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.
In: 8
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.
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