Apple: SG-001 (unnamed)

A seedling apple with tight upright growth and moderate vigour.

• Vigour: Medium
• Precociousness: Low
• Resistances: Unknown
• Size of fruit: Unknown
• Flowering: Unknown
• Fruiting: Unknown
• Cropping: Unknown
• Ploidy: Diploid (likely)
• Fruit colour: Unknown (Red is most likely)
• Flesh colour: Unknown (White is most likely)
• Leaf colour: Green
• Parentage: Ambrosia x Unknown (open pollinated)
• Descendants: None
• Biennialism: Unknown
• Growth habit: Upright tight (not columnar however)
• Self-fertile: Unknown (but unlikely)

Planted by Shane Gadsby (me!) in mid-2018 (Winter), from the seeds collected from a open pollinated commercial Ambrosia apple.
Grown indoors in a small pot until late 2018 (Summer), where they were transferred to 20 litre pots and placed for increasing lengths of time so as to harden off. At the beginning of 2020 they were planted into 50 litre pots where they were grown in a greenhouse until Spring of 2020. Where they were then planted in the ground, in a south facing corner of the yard (70% direct sun per day).

The decision to leave this tree a greenhouse for the winter of 2020 was a mistake that cost it nearly a full growing season, as the tall whip shaped tree failed to correctly break dormancy, and only a single bud broke at around 600mm from the ground, and caused a misshapen side-shoot that was left to grow to ensure the tree was able to survive until dormancy correctly broke in spring 2021 (when it was then removed to encourage the whip to grow more vigorously again).

In the first year it grew from seedling to around 600mm tall, and the second to a little over 2000mm (2+ metres) tall, seldom creating side branches longer than 100mm in length (with most if not all being closer to 20mm).

I'm extremely excited to see what happens next year, as it was very close to the 122 internodes usually required to get the apple to reach maturity, and so may set fruit next season.

In 2021 a scion was taken from the misshapen offshoot and grafted to MM102 rootstock, a dwarf rootstock with decent disease resistances (for Australia), and increased precociousness.
This was to both speed up maturation and convince the tree to set fruit, as well as test the strange branch for mutation.

NOTE: I have yet to try this apple directly, having only planted it in 2018, and so only a little information to go on.
This entry will be updated as the tree grows and bears.