How do we continue to grow seedless fruit if they don’t contain seeds?
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There are three basic ways to do this.
For long-lived vines, bushes, and trees, it’s done by cuttings. You find a rare mutant plant that produces good fruit with no seeds, then take cuttings from it. You root those in soil or graft them on to roots, and you essentially make a bunch of clones of the original. This is how it works for bananas and grapes.
For annual plants, it’s done by hybrids. For example, seedless watermelons are made by hybridizing two strains that produce infertile watermelons with few seeds. It’s a bit like breeding mules.
Finally, in some circumstances you can get seedless fruit by preventing fruit from being pollenated. This is how pineapples are kept seedless, for example, and it’s why Hawaii was a major pineapple producer. There were no native pollinators that would pollenate the fruit, resulting in seed free pineapples.
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