I was having a discussion with a collegue the other day about apples. He said if you plant an apple seed, say a red delicious seed, you do not know what kind of apple you are going to get. Is that true? And furthermore is it true all apples originated from the same southern region? How could that be? Are apples really the benign fruit we eat them as, or are they really quite mysterious?
Yes. It’s true. Can’t answer why, but apples (as well as other fruits) do not produce reliable high-quality fruits when grown from seed. Thats why they’re all grafted.
Makes you wonder why Johnny Appleseed was so successful, though. . .
from Encarta:
Apple trees have been cultivated for their fruit for many centuries. Early apple growers selected superior strains from wild seedlings and propagated them by grafting. Currently, many apple varieties are developed by controlled crossing of desirable parents. Beneficial mutation in standard varieties is also a source for new varieties. It is generally thought that modern apple varieties resulted from natural cross-pollination involving several species because modern varieties are heterozygous—that is, they do not reproduce true to type.
-end
From reading around, there were different species for centuries and some crossing of varieties produced other varieties. All this is very similar to other plants/fruits/etc. There were ‘varieties’ before man made more varieties by crossing them.
Maybe your friend is confused because some apples can’t be propogated by seeds…they won’t grow…because some apple varieties are created by crossing varieties and that means the seeds won’t bear new trees. Non of this is unusuall though.
read :
“Apple,”
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761574393&pn=1#s1
Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2002
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved
Quite true. Each seed will grow into something unique. Most of the time it’s some tastless woody little crab apple. But every so often, we get a winner. For example, a little old lady in Australia tossed some old apples in her compost heap. Later, an apple tree came up and she started using the fruit, 'cause, damn, they were good! This was around 1870. Her name? Grannie Smith.
The familiar apple varieties we know are all grown on trees produced by the budding and grafting of said winner. In other words, to get more Grannie Smith apple trees, you have to propagate a bit of another Grannie Smith apple tree. Thus, this tree will have the identical genome of that first seedling in Grannie’s garden.
Of course you can increase your chances of a winner by hybridization, crossbreeding two varieties that each have a desired characteristic.
While we think apples originated in the Middle East, they are found growing wild all over the globe. When white settlers first came to the New World they brought apple trees with them, but found crabapples already growing there.
Apples…yum.
To clarify a little more, when you produce an apple tree by grafting, basically you are producing a clone - an exact genetic duplicate - of the original tree (with the exception of the rootstock that has been grafted on to). This is the only way to ensure that the resulting fruit will have all the desirable qualities of the parent.
Seeds are produced by sexual reproduction, by fertilizing a flower with pollen from another tree. This results in scrambling the genes of the two parents, so that the qualities of the fruit of the resulting offspring will be much less predictable.
For more discussion on this, including information on why Johnny Appleseed was successful, I’d recommend Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.
I’m in the tulip chapter right now, but the first chapter is a discussion of the apple. The author did quite a bit of research on Johnny Appleseed. Turns out that a lot of those early apples were not EATEN but were in fact used to brew hard cider.
It was only during Prohibition that a campaign was raised on “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” that we started to really EAT apples a lot. At that point, sweetness and appearance became more important --> uniformity in crops that only grafting can provide.
scout1222 I got Pollan’s book for Christmas and have not picked it, up. I thumbed through the sections on the Potato and Marijuana, but have not read the entire work yet. Nice coincidence to get me to pick it up though.
Johnny’s apples were crabapples, mostly. I’ve eaten plenty of crabapples. Some of his were found to be more desireable though–I believe a few of his original plantings were developed to eventually be some of the commercial varieties we know today.
Well, now, there you go!
And now you know,… the REST of the story.
Good Day.
It’s true that seed-grown apples will show a lot of variation, but there’s a good deal more variation in appearance than in flavor. A seed-grown apple is likely to be ugly, but tasty. At least, in my experience.
Note that many apple varieties are sports of older types. That is, a mutation occurs on the growing tip of a branch and the branches that form off of this carry that trait. If the apples from that branch are interesting, then grafts are made from it, etc. One famous sport produced “spur” type clusters of apples.
Another way to produce a “new” variety is to graft an old variety on a rootstock with an interesting property. This is how many dwarf varieties are produced. Graft a full size type onto a dwarf (or semi-dwarf) rootstock. Presto, you get a dwarf of the original type. No breeding necessary.
The most famous of these “bud sports” is the nectarine. Some peach tree somewhere started growing them on one of its branches. It was not, as most people believe, a hybrid of peaches and plums.
I believe that the commercial production of new varieties involves a success rate of one in many thousands - the breeder will germinate thousands of seedlings, quite a few will produce reasonable fruit, but of course ‘reasonable’ isn’t any good; only a very few of the seedlings will produce plants and fruit with traits that make it a market winner.
Semi-wild fruit trees can be found alongside many of England’s railways (both those in common use and disused tracks converted to country walks) - I’m told that these are the descendants (sometimes third generation or more) of seedlings germinated from apple cores, plum stones etc thrown from railway carriages by the Victorians (although of course, some of them may be modern, but people eat pork pies and dried-out sandwiches on trains now). Many of the railway apples still bear a passing resemblance to cultivated varieties; they are often smaller and less sweet, but not as small and sour as a true crab apple.
Hey, this is an apple thread! Anyway, why would you say that nectarines are more famous than Red Delicious apples or Granny Smith or Macintosh?
Well RM, they’re famous for originating as a mutant tree branch. Did the apples too? Or did they come from seedlings? I know the Grannie Smith was a seedling (see above post).
I gotta read up on this stuff.
Apples…yum
This may well be the first SDMB thread about Apple superiority that doesn’t end up in the Pit!
Haj