Someone mentioned to me how all the apple trees would be crab apples unless we cloned and grafted other tree types onto them?? Idk if this is even right but can someone explain apple trees to me?? I did go apple picking and saw the stumps for the trees are different from the actual tree. Also what is a crab apple? I have questions. Thanks!! Hahaha
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Apples aren’t “true to type”.
The genetics for the characteristics of their fruit are extremely complex/unpredictable. If you take an apple seed from a tree and plant it it has almost no chance of being meaningfully similar to the tree it came from, and probably either tastes bad and/or is really small. I’ve heard these called “crab apples”, but that may be a regional thing.
You could plant literally thousands of apple seeds and wait for the trees to mature before you got a single tree that produced a tasty, nice sized fruit and a decent quantity of it, and then it might be a feeble tree so poorly suited for agriculture.
The result it it takes a lot of time and effort to breed new apple variants.
But…. Once you find one what you can do is take a cutting from it and then “graft” it to a root from another apple tree – ie attach it to a root system cut from another tree. The tree that grows will be a genetic clone of the cutting and will produce the same delicious apples.
At the same time you can pick the root half of the splice from a tree type that is very hardy and resistant to disease, these traits will carry into the root system of the new tree, because the roots are genetic clones of the tree they came from, thus giving you a hardy root system.
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