Actually that’s not how it’s done in modern times with many types of fruit trees and such. The most common source of new varieties are “sports”.
Someone notices a branch of a tree has some interesting fruit (better tasting, different color, etc.), they cut some grafts off it and put it on rootstock. (Watching for any back changes.)
This is how you get seedless fruits. Bananas (not technically a tree but same idea) have been propagated like this for so long that we can’t grow new types that are resistant to fungus from the seeds of existing popular types.
Some fruits that originated from sports go back many hundreds of years.
I’m sure it depends on the species, but there’s been a lot of work on breeding apples (growing new ones from seeds) recently, and some genetic engineering to produce apples that don’t brown. But seeking new, valuable apple sports was a bigger deal in the 50s and 60s than it is today. So much so that some university programs irradiated apple buds to produce sports to evaluate. But today there’s a lot of breeding.
If we can develop GMO plants and CRISPR modified plants, that would seem to mean that we can change the genetics of a seed so that it grows into some other plant than it would have naturally. And, again, that would imply that we could swap out the DNA of a natural banana seed with the DNA from a seedless banana variety, and grow a fresh, whole plant from seed.
I have no idea what the success rate is on that, but it’s probably worth doing.
Modern banana cultivars are hybrids or polyploids (or both). The ever-popular ‘Cavendish’ is a triploid Musa acuminata cultivar, i.e., it has three sets of the genome rather than the usual two. It’s this non-standard number of genomes that leads to sterility.
I know CRISPR is all the rage and oh so very sexy, but Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation is tried and tested technology. It’s already been used to produce resistant bananas.
Banana (Musa spp.) is a staple food for more than 400 million people. Over 40% of world production and virtually all the export trade is based on Cavendish banana. However, Cavendish banana is under threat from a virulent fungus, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense tropical race 4 (TR4) for which no acceptable resistant replacement has been identified. Here we report the identification of transgenic Cavendish with resistance to TR4. In our 3-year field trial, two lines of transgenic Cavendish, one transformed with RGA2, a gene isolated from a TR4-resistant diploid banana, and the other with a nematode-derived gene, Ced9, remain disease free. Transgene expression in the RGA2 lines is strongly correlated with resistance. Endogenous RGA2 homologs are also present in Cavendish but are expressed tenfold lower than that in our most resistant transgenic line. The expression of these homologs can potentially be elevated through gene editing, to provide non-transgenic resistance.
My mother’s family had a large orchard down in Georgia, and a cider press. I don’t know anything about grafting, but i can answer a few questions above. Please keep in mind these are the recollections of a kid helping out on the farm in Summer.
Modern apples are 2-3 times the size of their predecessors. The tree that grows from the seed (even supposing the bees haven’t mixed the pollens to make Franken-seeds) can’t support the fruit. The tree would just split, or fail to provide enough sap, or fall over in the first big storm. It needs root stock bred for deep tap roots and stronger wood to support the fruit through wind and drought.
You can’t feed cider press solids to animals because the seeds contain small amounts of poison. (Arsenic maybe? I don’t recall.) Anyway, an apple or two is fine for a horse, but they won’t survive a concentrated mash of pressed apple solids. We always just composted them. If you didn’t let it get too hot (heat broke down the pouson) it left a soil that was nutritious, held water well, and killed a lot of bugs. Sadly it also killed earthworms. Peach pits had even more concentrated poisons and we used them like mulch to make protective rings that killed slugs.
Sweet apples that are too ugly to sell become fresh cider. Sour apples become hard cider. Really sour apples become hard, mulled cider. (With added spices and molasses as necessary.) Cooking also sweetens sour or starchy apples, so applesauce and baked apples made with them will still be delicious. So none of those seed-sown trees would have been wasted, you just use them differently.
If the apples were from seedlings, there was probably a variation in how much each had. So some may have had more than usual for apples and their worry about it would not have been misplaced.
More importantly, cider press leavings are mostly seeds. It’s would be a much bigger dose of seeds than you all are picturing, i think. Obviously I’ve never tested it, but there are stories about prisoners saving up apple seeds to commit suicide with.
There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe about a guy trying to locate some of the many lost varieties of apples from remaining trees. I had to post quotes from the article (which is paywalled – I post the link below, though), because the numbers astonish me
From “In Search of the Lost Apples of New England” by Veronique Greenwood, Boston Sunday Globe July 9 2023
16,0000 varieties!
“You can read old catalogs and lust for a Danvers Winter Sweet or whatever, but no one has those anymore.”
It goes on to mention that a variety called Golden Russet was prized for its use in cider, which shows that not all cider making was indiscriminate alcoholic brewing. Apparently GR still exists, but it originally came in a number of sub-varieties that they’re still trying to unscramble.
John Bunker – that’s a familiar name. I know him from a mailing list about fruit, and also as part of Fedco Seeds; though he recently retired from there.
There are a number of companies (Fedco among them) carrying heirloom apples. Getting the right names attached is indeed important work. And there are undoubtedly still excellent trees out there that nobody’s rescued yet.
Most of those 16,000 cultivars weren’t anything special. Every seed produces a new apple tree, after all.
There aren’t a lot of types of apple for sale at supermarkets, but there are several hundred you can buy a tree of, without a lot of work. If only i had more sun and fewer squirrels…