How to grow trees from seed.

Growing fruit trees from seed is not easy. The seedlings and then the saplings need to have special care. If your seeds are locally harvested this will be slightly easier. Then when you have your sapling up to a half in or so you might need to graft a similar size clipping from the mother tree to insure similar fruit. It is actually quite fun, even if there are many to do and the grafting is a piece of cake. I once had nine similar fruits grafted to one tree in our front yard. What a lovely tree with six different colored flowers in the Spring.

I would strongly advise that you reconsider growing an orchard from seeds. the fact of the matter is that it is very unlikely that you will bear much fruit from your years of hard work in caring for and nurturing your seedlings to a fruit-bearing age. This age would be about 5 to 7 years for the seed types you have mentioned.

Professional orchards are almost always based upon grafted trees. Fruit trees are notoriously susceptible to disease, both above and below ground. So the strategy that growers use is to breed trees for their disease hardiness in the root system first; these are called "rootstock". Next, they breed for the desired fruit characteristics: size, color, shape, flavor, etc. When they have the desired fruit type, then they graft this variety onto the rootstock, and that is the tree that will have a very good chance of surviving and producing the desired fruit.

So, I would like to prevent your future disappointment by urging you to purchase young trees from a reputable nursery. There are a number of these sources online, and you might pay as little as just ten to twenty dollars for a 3-year-old grafted tree. You will need to do some research. Now these trees are only shipped "dry root" in the Fall and Early Spring. So now would be a good time to order.

Good luck with your orchard!