Karyn,
I am glad to be able to answer this one for you, since your advice on starting was helpful. Seed do not grow true, the only way to carry on the strain of apples is through grafting the scions. I have an apples, pears, plums, cherries, and other fruit bearing trees in my orchard. All my thees are grafted onto wild root stock and designed to grow is zone three. This is an interesting fact for you also. The number of seed in a apple represents the number of times the flower was polinated.
Now here is on for you. I have a tex 48 lighting system to install in my greenhouse, when assembled. I have 40,000 light lumens. I was to it is better for veg growth that metal halide. They compared it to around a 800 watt metal halide if there was one. You stated in my post you like your metal halide better. Why?
One more for you. 50% of my 2nd batch of seeds sprouted, when should I place in larger containers? They are only a inch and starting first set of leaves. However the plugs I used get to dry out within 20 hours and I feel that placing them in larger containers will make them last through the night. Or can I water more than once a day.

Thanks,
Dean
Northern Lights Orchard.

P.S Fruit trees will bear fruit between four and six years. Also if you want a certain type of tree, I strongly recommened where I order from. ST LAWERENCE NURSERIES or sln nurseries.com in new york.

Thanks for the info someone else emailed me and told me that they don't grow true also. That's interesting about the seed count. I'm not sure why I saved the seeds to begin with because I don't really want an apple tree in my yard. lol I have a bad habit of saving and sowing all kinds of seeds. I used to grow peaches and got so sick of fruit dropping and all the bugs that I chopped them down. The only fruit trees I grow now are citrus and a few tropical varieties, all in containers due to being in zone 7a. I might keep them growing and use them as rootstock for grafting experiments.

I don't use HID lights in the greenhouse because of the heat they produce. I do get a good deal of natural light in the greenhouse anyway and the fluorescents are sufficient. I do use HID bulbs in the grow room that I have set up in my house for wintering over some plants. I find that in the house I get much better results with the metal halide than I do with fluorescent bulbs. I was surprised at how many of my plants have been blooming and even setting fruit inside because I decided against using HPS and only have MH bulbs. MH are for vegitative growth and HPS are for flower production. I have 2 1000 watt HID MH bulbs and each puts out 110,000 lumens.

How are you watering your seedlings? Are you bottom watering and completely saturating them? I don't usually transplant until they get the second set of true leaves, depending on how many seedlings are in each cell. If I only have 1 or 2 seedlings per cell I'll wait longer. If yours are drying out so quickly you might want to transplant sooner. Watering 2x a day sounds awfully time consuming if you have a large number of seedlings but I'd definitely wait until you have a set of true leaves.
Karyn