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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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.
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