Not according to these sites:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2008-06-01/Grow-Free-Fruit-Trees.aspx
Your own quote says it right there. “Most peach trees sold by nurseries are named cultivars budded or grafted onto a suitable rootstock. It is also possible to grow a tree from either a peach or nectarine seed, but the fruit quality of the resulting tree will be very unpredictable.”
The article from Mother Earth News does disagree, “But the almondlike seeds in pits from peaches, nectarines and apricots do a good job of carrying on the desirable traits of their parents,” but they’re the only ones I’ve seen say so.
From the Michigan Peach Council: “If you take the pit from a peach and plant it, a peach tree may grow. It takes about three years for the tree to begin producing fruit. Remember, the fruit you get may look nothing like the peach the pit came from (you do not look exactly like your parents).”
From Robert Cox, horticulturist at Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, “Peaches from seed can result in trees that bear decent fruit, although they may not look or taste just like the peach from which peach pit (28727 bytes) the pit came. Most commercial peach varieties are budded onto specific varieties of rootstock.”
FromLynette Morgan of Growing Edge, “Once you have your peach seedling, its a good idea to graft it onto a good variety (a shoot with buds taken from a good cultivar of fruiting peach) since seedling-grown peaches don’t often produce very good quality fruit compared to the varieties of peach you can buy from nurseries (which are always a rootstock with a good fruiting type grafted on top)”
Of course you can grow a peach tree from a pit. The question was whether the resulting tree would “get a tree of the same variety without having to graft it”. From all sites I can find other than the Mother Earth News one, the answer is no, it’s not likely.
But, as I say above, that’s far milder than the almost absolute pronouncement that you won’t get a usable apple by planting apple seeds that I find virtually everywhere. The end result seems to be that there’s a pretty good possibility of getting a desirable peach by planting a random peach pit.
“Desireable”, perhaps. But it won’t be the same that the parent of the pit, which is what **Gymnopithys **was told. It might still be juicy and sweet and round, but it won’t have the same genetics as the parent tree without grafting.
I don’t think you mean placenta, which is composed of fetal cells.
After reading the Red Delicious wiki entry, and the apple breeding entry I see what’s going on. Wiki says it well:
So anyway, what we think of as Red Delicious today is one of over 50 cultivars from the original reddish yellow fruit named “Hawkeye” and later “Stark Delicious.” It’s a mutated clone of a mutated clone of a mutated clone, etc.
Can you cross two Red Delicious cultivars and get a Red Delicious cultivar? Yes. Reliably? No, unless you’ve got the time and space.
If an apple tree springs forth from a Red Delicious seed, it will almost certainly produce fruit superior to its parent fruit. Red Delicious apples simply aren’t what their name suggests-- every other variety I’ve tried (around twenty I could list) taste better.
Now back to the genetics-
From my reading of what has gone before, this almost certainly won’t be true. Apparently most genetic mixes of apples produce extremely substandard fruit. That was the point of my OP-- why was that?
As for your comments on Red Delicious apples – De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est*, but they’re my favorite variety.
*Very Literally Meant, in this case.
De gustibus non est disputandum. Red Delicious apples are my favourite kind of apples.
ETA - Oops; I see someone else likes that phrase too.
For an extremely interesting discussion of apple cultivation (also tulips, potatoes, and cannabis), grab a copy of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire (also made into a PBS documentary). He talks at length about the relative paucity of hand-edible apples, pointing out that what Johnny Appleseed was doing was providing a source of raw material for alcohol, not pie.
When a tree was discovered that produced sweet fruit, it was fenced in and padlocked until a sufficient number of grafted clones were made to make the fruit commercially viable. Sweet apple varieties were, and are, extremely rare and valuable.
I’ve read this, and am skeptical. Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) was an incredibly odd and interesting character, who reportedly didn’t believe in pruning or grafting (although I haven’t read the primary sources). But he can’t have been unaware that it would’ve been easy for others who didn’t share his beliefs to use his planted orchards as rootstock for “traditional” eating apples. I understand that people used to come through communities selling and grafting buds all the time – it was a regular business.
On top of which you could also make apple cider vinegar from those poor-quality apples, in addition to cider and applejack. I suspect those apples weren’t altogether bad for baking, too. I’m unconvinced that Appleseed was just selling the makings of alcohol.
I’ve come across many references to Pollan’s book. I’m going to have to read it.
It’s been some time since I read the book, but, IIRC, what Chapman did was to move a year or two ahead of the westward migration along the Ohio River, acquiring cheap land, planting apple trees, and selling the young trees to new settlers when they arrived. Much easier for them to buy local, established saplings than to bring them, and their heavy root balls, along. The settlers used the apples primarily for hard cider. (A quick look at his Wikipedia entry confirms the broad outline of this story.)
He might have been a bit of an odd duck, but he left an estate of over 1200 acres of apple nurseries in Ohio and Indiana.
It is a great book. Not so political about agriculture and food like his more recent works–just a lot of interesting history and ideas.
cider keeps longer than the fruit, hard cider more so, just preserving food value.
My point is that they didn’t have to bring “heavy root balls” along. They could simply buy the existing orchards planted by Chapman and use them as rootstock for “eating apple” buds, which they could buy from the grafting salesmen (who didn’t have to carry “heavy root balls”, either – buds are pretty light). They grafted the buds onto the trees that grew (in more than a year – apple trees take about seven years to get big enough for fruit), and had perfectly good eating apples.
And even though Chapman didn’t like grafying himself (it’s said), he probably wasn’t unaware that this was going on. i don;t think he could have been. But what people did with his orchards after he sold them wasn’t his business.
So I don’t think he was just in the alcohol busines.
And, yeah, apples might last longer and be good trade goods in alcogolic form. But sometimes you want to eat, too. It made more economic sense to take corn and feed it to ghogs and march them to market. Or to turn it into corn liquor. But people still wanted to eat corn, as well.