If you plant an apple seed any type of apple could grow…

[Hatetagsinclothes]

Just gone down the wormhole of apples whilst trying to read about Granny Smith.

So an apple seed does not grow the same variety of the one it came from.

It is a genetic lottery and you could get any type of apple. A new amazing variety or a hard sour apple.

So how do they keep making Granny Smiths? Well it’s a clone of the first ever Granny Smith tree. They use clippings and attach that to another tree. So there is no actual Granny Smith tree!

It’s really fascinating when you search how all these apples were discovered.

For example how Pink Lady got trademarked and How you have to be part of a club to grow the Jazz Apple.

Hang on. I need to sit down.

I had no idea about this! Sounds really interesting

I could google this, but it’s going to be a good thread!

I knew this about apples ( A friend's father was a farmer with apple orchards). I know all about grafting etc. You pick the apple type you want, and then the root from the size of the tree you want it to be (look low down on the tree for the graft)

My sister has a tree in her garden with 3 different apple varieties growing on it. You can get trees with apple, rowan, hawthorn and pear but this is harder to do.

I did not know this!

So all those years I was told never to swallow apple seeds as I’d have an apple tree growing out my ears, I could have had any variety. Who knew!

I knew this 😁

I absolutely love Macintosh apples, but never see them these days. So I had the brilliant idea of growing acouple of trees from seeds.

That was when I discovered the apple seed lottery.

I was both devastated and fascinated in equal measure.

It is a good plan to avoid eating apple pips, because they contain cyanide.

I know far too much about this due to an Primary teacher who was OBSESSED with Johnny Appleseed. I mean yeah, ok, it is amazing but it formed at least 1/3 of my year 3-6 education 😂

I knew this as my Dad grows apples plus read a fascinating book about the history of apples earlier this year by Sally Coulthard The apple a delicious history

I’ve been talking about this all day to people around me. It is crazy I thought you could grow the apples that you want but you can’t.

If you look into Jazz apples they are heavily controlled.

Well that’s my new fact learned for the day, thanks OP!

As an aside I cannot hear ‘Jazz Apple’ without thinking it’s a euphemism.

I had no idea! Thanks OP that’s fascinating and I have ordered the book recommended by PP.

Woahhhhhh! But also my apple trees just do the same apples!

We have an apple tree a which always produces cooking apples and another one that is crab apples I think. I’m guessing when you’re talking about apple varieties you are talking about the curated apples that didn’t exist before the first graft. If so that makes sense.

They all hail from Kazakhstan originally and spread around the world thanks to the Silk Road. People would break off branches and stick them in the apples to keep them moist, basically taking cuttings of them, and plant them back home. They would also eat them and save the seeds to plant back home. Also, they would obviously spit or poo out the seeds along the way which helped them spread across the globe.

They, the original apple forests, were all pretty much going to be destroyed by development about 10-15 years ago but I believe funding was found to try and represerve this heritage.

Alys Fowler went there again about a decade ago, and brought back thousands of seeds from fruit she collected in the forests, and to get them back into the UK, sowed them into her hems and clothes to avoid being stopped at customs. I never found out how her project went, she bought some land in which to grow all these trees to see what genetic properties had and to see if some better growing and tasting genetics could be used for UK growing.

There was a chap who used to work at one of the apple heritage places dahn sarf, who grafted at least 100 different varieties onto one tree in his garden.

My favourite tasting apple ever is the Pitmaston Pineapple.

Most 'new varieties' are controlled by Breeders Rights for a certain amount of time. Especially when they have specific qualities that make them easily identifiable.

There is an Apple tree in PIL garden that is over 6ft tall that DH planted as a child. He is 55.
No one eats the apples.

The Strange World of Apples 🍎
Most people assume that if you plant the seeds from an apple, you’ll grow a tree that produces the same apples. But that’s not how cultivated apples work!

The genetic lottery
Apples don’t grow true to type from seed. If you plant the seeds from a Granny Smith, Gala or Jazz apple, the resulting tree will produce genetically unique apples. That’s because apple trees cross-pollinate, and their offspring inherit a new combination of genes from two parent trees.
Each seed is essentially a genetic lottery ticket. You could plant thousands of seeds from your favourite apple and not get the exact same variety. Finding a new apple with all the desirable characteristics of an existing commercial variety is incredibly unlikely. The often-repeated figure of 1 in 10,000 is an illustration of how difficult it can be to find a commercially desirable seedling, not a fixed scientific probability.

So how do we get identical apples?
Through cloning! Not laboratory cloning, but grafting.
Growers take a small branch or bud from an existing tree and graft it onto another apple tree’s rootstock. The new branches are genetically identical to the original fruit-producing tree and produce the same variety.
That’s why Granny Smith apples around the world are descendants of the original tree discovered by Maria Ann Smith in Australia in the 1860s. The original tree is long gone, but its genetic lineage lives on through grafting.

But what about wild apples?
Wild apple species also reproduce sexually through seeds, so their offspring aren’t necessarily identical either. However, wild apple populations maintain a naturally occurring diversity of trees and fruit. They aren’t usually cultivated to preserve one specific, commercially desirable apple. Some wild apple species can also reproduce vegetatively, producing genetically similar offspring.

And then there’s the exclusive apple club!
Some modern apples operate under what’s known as a club variety system.
Take the Jazz apple. It was deliberately bred in New Zealand by crossing Braeburn and Royal Gala. Breeders grew the resulting seedlings, selected one with the right characteristics and named its variety Scifresh.

But here’s the catch: you can’t simply decide to grow and commercially sell Jazz apples. They’re protected by a licensing system. Approved growers are allowed to produce them under strict quality and marketing conditions.
Other examples include Pink Lady, Envy and Kanzi.

So essentially, someone can plant an apple seed and potentially discover an entirely new variety, but they can’t just plant a Jazz pip and expect to grow Jazz apples.

The irony? Every time you eat an apple, you’re eating the result of centuries of genetic experimentation, selective breeding and a little bit of luck. And the apple you love might be a clone of one particularly lucky tree that someone discovered generations ago!

Varieties of all new plant varieties would have breeders rights protected for a set amount of time, 25/30yrs I think. I know someone that owns the rights to a malting barley variety for example - he earns money for every tonne of seed sold, and every new variety that uses it as a parent plant.
It’d be the same for everything thats sold commercially roses, cabbages, corn. It costs a fortune to breed a new rose or apple variety, many decades of work and trial and error, so no point doing it if it’s not protected.

We planted an apple tree years ago that was a “heirloom” variety, it is just like biting into a bar of soap! Which explains why its a rare unpopular variety😂

That’s the only Apple i like.

Are you able to buy them anywhere?

I grew up in south West Scotland, and we got them all the time.

After we moved to England, I never saw them again, apart from two occasions. One, when visiting my MIL near Leeds, and once when I was working at a Tesco in Milton Keynes. I walked into the warehouse at the start of my shift, and immediately said "I can smell Macintosh apples".

I think I lived on apples that week. Sadly I've never seen them again.

Wait what!

I’m in the west of Scotland, it’s hard to get them. A farm shop near me sometimes has them…they smell like Halloween lol.

This is crazy. So apple trees are just like people? In that you could never actually make the same one twice naturally?

So what about golden delicious then? It's the same? That one tree then is grafted to make ALL golden delicious apples?

Three thoughts:

• I haven't googled to check whether this is true but it is so insane I wouldn't be surprised if its a hoax!

• How are single varieties sold in such volume in supermarkets if they have to be created like this? Just thing of the amoun of Granny Smiths/golden delicious sold by just one supermarket, then the chain across the country. How? that's so much grafting!

• Doesn't this make individual varieties hugely vulnerable to disease wipe out? If you are a producer and you have your one orchard with all your grafted trees, and some kind of pest or disease passes through, kills them all - your variety is toast?

If I had to only eat one apple it would be a James Grieve. My father was a professional gardener and our garden was filled with fruit trees, but I think the most romantic thing he did, was to graft a cooking apple onto a Cox’s Orange Pippin, so that it was not so far for my mum to walk down the garden when she was making him an apple pie.