Hello! So I’ve been reading this book chapter about apples and in it it says that apples grown from seed tend to be very different from the apple from which the seed came, and frequently lack desired characteristics. Later on in the chapter, it says that what growers do is they usually graft together a rootstock and a scion to form an apple tree that has desired characteristics (and that also bears fruit with desired characteristics?). But the rootstock and scion are grown from seed, no? So how do they come together and produce fruit that is similar to apples that have been grown on the orchard in the past and that DOES have desired characteristics? I feel like there is something fundamental that I am not getting. Any help understanding this would be appreciated.
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You plant an apple seed and then, when the new tree has grown a little, you graft a branch (“scion”) from another, already grown tree on it. The tree from which you took the branch produced the kind of apples that you need, and so the grafted branch will “stay true” and produce the same kind of apples. The root and the bottom part of the combined tree came from a seed, but since you replaced the top from which the fruits will come, it doesn’t matter. Basically all the apple trees of the same type like, say, Red Delicious, are clones of the one tree from 19th century, or at least their top parts are. They were all grown from grafted branches, not seeds. The seeds only provided them with their root systems and lower stems.
Almost all tree related fruit/nuts are produced from what amounts to clones of the tree that produced the desired fruit.
They clone the trees by grafting a branch to the trunk of another tree’s root. The roots will always be the tree with undesirable fruit and the top part will be a clone of the desireable tree.
Of special note, if the roots send up “suckers” then any fruit produced from that growth will be from the root tree and not the grafted tree. This is why Bradford pear tree are an invasive plague on the USA.
Fruit is a product of the tree it grows on. It is the same every time. A seed is the product of that tree and whatever tree pollinated it. The trees that grow from those seeds are a mix. And, the fruit they produce will be a mix and not the same, depending on what other trees are around to pollinate it. So, if you want the same fruit you get from a certain tree, the sure way to get it is to splice branches from that tree onto other root stock where they will grow to produce the same fruit.
Planting an apple seed is like buying a lottery ticket. You don’t know what kind of apples the tree is going to give you.
But, if you plant a whole bunch of apple seeds, you’ll eventually get a tree that gives you apples you like. Now, you can cut a branch off that tree and graft that to root stock, and then you can take more cuttings from those trees… and so on. You are basically making a bunch of clones that will all make the same type of fruit.
To add onto the previous comments:
Growing good-tasting apples is actually really hard. Like, it took a hundred years to properly work out a tasty apple that would sell well to consumers. Apple trees just really like screwing up their recipe, and once you’ve got a good apple there’s no guarantee that you’ll get more of it from the same tree, or its seeds. Really all you know is that the branch is good.
So what you do is you chunk off part of the branch and stick it onto another apple tree. The tree will actually adopt the new branch if you do it right, patch up the hole, and badaboom you’ve got a second tree that produces the exact same apples as the first. Meanwhile that branch you cut part of will grow back, and you’ve doubled your good apple output.
Every kind of apple you see in the stores is a carefully-bred result of a thousand bad apples (pun intended). Most of them will be genetically identical, often all having the same ancestral branch that made the very first *good* version of a Honeycrisp, or Red Delicious, or Gala, or McIntosh, etc.
Hort guy here, simple view, seed varies in genetics, tissue culture doesn’t (propagation from stems and leaves). Grafting is essentially, which apple tree has the best root system for water and nutrient uptake, and which fruit can we splice together that is marketable to suppliers and customers. It’s all cost based and how vigorous the plant can grow. It’s way more effective in citrus though.
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