Fruit Trees

Having had a look round the net and a few garden centres, i notice that you cannot buy seeds for fruit trees, only fruit tree seedlings.


IS this correct that they can only be grown by grafting/chip budding etc type propagation?  Compared to the cost of a packet of seeds, fruit trees are very expensive...... How did they reproduce before man came along ?

If it is not a hybrid or cross-pollinating then you can, but grafts can save you upto a decade waiting, depending, also, hybrids, you don't know what you get, a long wait to find out it a useless seedling.

Non-hybrid sour cherries and cherries are one of the easiest and fastest to fruit, only some years, want a sour cherry seed or two, pm me your address, but if willing to pay for postage , have saplings as suckers, too, much faster job.

A lot of the hybrids these days have overcome many disease and pest problems of the past, along with sizes to fit various gardens, not to mention tastier varieties. A friend has a very old, very tall apple tree that self-seeded itself, and it produces absolutely masses of the worst tasting and dry apples you'd ever find. The tree is left as winter feed for the birds since you can't even sauce these apples nicely.
Considering many trees in garden centres and catalogues are 3-5 years old, you're ahead of the game in harvest time unless you're going for a standard (full) sized tree and have about 15 more years to wait for harvest. Without grafting onto dwarf rootstock, you'll only get standard trees.