I am growing a few good apple trees in my roof garden, in pots. I love growing the trees, and of course love the fruit. Since I am in a warm climate, I grow appropriate apple cultivars which are professionally grafted and yield beautiful apples.
Apart from that I also have an experimental area where I grow six apple plants grown from seed. One of them finally blossomed this year (about 4 years from seed) and the fruits have set and look promising. The others have not yet blossomed.
Since this is a four year experiment (and counting) I had time to look online and try to answer a question I had all this time - what are my chances of success?
According to some sources, the chance to get an apple tree which yields any fruit is about 1 in 10, and a tree yielding edible apples at about 1 in 25. Other sources also claim statistics as 1:250 to get an apple as good as the origin, and 1:250,000 to get a better apple than the original. All the sources are contradictory, and I don't know if growing apple from seed is a sensible thing to do, or an incredibly slim chance of success.
To be clear: I have no intentions of growing the next commercial cultivar in my roof garden - I just hope to get nice, edible apples. Does anyone know the chances of getting there?