Apples

The University of Saskatchewan has been breeding apples since the 1920s. In the last 25 years, we have grown 35,000 seedlings and selected the best for further use in our breeding program. In most recent years, enhanced cold hardiness, fruit quality, and storage life have been used as criteria for selecting the next generation of prairie apples.

Growing apples gardening at usask link

These are apple cultivars selected from U of S seedlings in the last 20 years. Only those listed as 'U of S Introductions' are recommended by the U of S Fruit Program. Others have been named by the former Prairie Apple Producers Inc. (PAPI).

-U of S Cultivar Introductions

-U of S Seedlings Named By PAPI

If you live on the Canadian prairies, and there's an apple growing in your backyard, then there's a good chance that apple is on this list. These are the apples that have survived on the prairies, despite our cold prairie winters and hot dry summers.

The term 'seedling' can be ambiguous. Young fruit trees are often referred to as 'seedlings', but fruit trees used commercially or grown in your backyard are never grown from seed. Desirable fruit quality and growth habits are preserved by using vegetative propagation, which makes exact copies or clones of the mother plant. So when we or any other fruit research organization refer to seedlings, we are describing trees that have been grown from seed. These seeds are the careful product of time-consuming controlled crosses, where the pollen used to fertilize the flower is carefully chosen in order to produce the most desirable offspring. 

The foundation for all apple trees. Apples are not propagated on their own roots but are grafted onto a rootstock. This has many advantages. It allows apples to be put on dwarfing, disease-resistant, or hardy rootstock. It also allows propagators to take immature plants that are growing vegetatively for years before fruiting and graft mature material that will fruit much sooner allowing the grower to harvest fruit off of a much smaller tree.

• Breeding of grape and apples with emphasis on juice products and rootstocks. An ADF grant that was finished in 2013.
• University of Saskatchewan Apple Introductions 2010
• Apples Named by PAPI 2010
• Ancestry of Apple Selections at the University of Saskatchewan
• History of Commercial Apple Production on the Prairies
• Descriptions of 3 Recommended Apple Cultivars: January 2010
• Edible Apples in Prairie Canada[~3mb] (Special thanks to The Friends of the Garden, University of Alberta Devonian Botanic Garden, for allowing us to post this.)
  

• Apple Sensory Results 2001
• Apple Sensory Results 2002
• Apple Sensory Long Storage Results 2002
• Apple Sensory Results 2003
• Apple Sensory Results 2004
• Apple Descriptions
• Apple Ripening Dates
• Budding and Grafting Dates
• Prairie Fruit Breeding Cooperative Summary (late 70s)
• Edible Apples in Prairie Canada (*NOTE: This file is approximately ~3mb)