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.

Interesting!

Interesting, isnt it.

Ive got 2 apple trees in my front garden i grew from seeds from a pink lady apple from tesco.

There were 5 seeds in total, the other 3 didnt make it.

The apples are delicious but definitely not pink lady.

It’s 04.49 and pitch black outside, but I’m genuinely considering putting my odd waking hours to good use and planting seeds from my apples right now. I did not know this and am fascinated! Thanks OP

The bit I didnt know was that scientists definitively settled on a homeland for the large fruiting apples. Last I heard it was still disputed but was probably Anatolia, now evidently its been shifted further east.

Apples play a huge role in myth and legend. We are lucky they can make so many varieties so easily!

Another fact to entertain you... apples are a member of the rose family: rosaceae.

I planted two raw Royal Gala pips & they are both growing, the one I kept in a pot is about a metre tall & the one I planted in my wild flower patch is now seven. feet tall,They both had a little blossom in spring time but the few tiny apples fell off after a few weeks.

Thats amazing😃

Learn something new every day! Now I want to plant apple seeds and see what grows.

Cross pollination, happens all the time with loads of plants. Squash are notorious for this, you can plant a seed from a butternut you grew which got pollinated with a bloody cucumber resulting in some really weird results down the line (some actually end up being toxic).
Same with zinnias for example, you can end up with completely different flowers from one year to the next.

If you have a little outdoor space you can make a mini greenhouse/cold frame and try planting all sorts of things you have left over from your food, it's great fun and free 😀

I did grow tomato plants from seeds one year, they were delicious. Also tried to grow strawberries from the seeds from wild forest strawberries but nothing grew.

@Natskuchills work quite well but they do need full sun. I've also grown several citrus trees from pips but none that have born any fruit. Leaves smell nice though. Oh and the classic avocado pit, I put mine in a big pot and it's about 1m tall (I had to cut the top off as it was taller than me) and quite bushy looking, I don't think I'll ever see any fruit on it though 😅

The same tree doesn’t change apples…they mean if you plant the seed you don’t know which type of apple tree you will get.

I need to go to read up on this a bit more as it sounds so strange.

If you have a particular apple (eg. a Granny Smith) and you plant the seed, the seed is in the Granny Smith apple, it's part of it and has come from the tree.

So you put it in the ground and it grows. What do you get?

This thread suggests it could be anything but is that really right? If it's a seed made on a Granny Smith tree out of a granny smitth apple, even if it is going to be a bit different like a human child of human parents, surely it will be Granny Smith adjacent?

I mean in human terms two blue-eyed white ginger parents aren't going to give birth to a dark eyed, black haired child.

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that the tree might be a granny smith but it might not get pollinated by another granny smith. That's why commercial growers graft the variety they want onto root stock instead of letting nature choose. That way they get the apple they want.
The combination of genes of your tree and the tree it got pollinated by can come up with lots of different apples.
Like your kids aren't clones, they can look quite different.
Even more so if they have different fathers, which is what happens when the tree in your garden gets randomly pollinated every year.

My two trees grown from pink lady apple seeds produced quite different little apples this year. one was very red and a bit bigger and the other red and green and a tad smaller. The red ones were sweet and the others a bit sharp. They probably pollinated each other as well. It really is random.

Apples have 2 parents. The fruit grows from a flower that has been pollinated by another tree.

Bees transfer pollen between all the apple trees within about a mile, so the resulting seeds will be hybrids with all the surrounding types - including crab appleas and wild apples.

A lot of apple varieties have to be pollinated by a different variety - pollen of the same type doesn't work. It would be impossible to breed a true variety from these even if you kept the tree in a sealed box to prevent any other type of pollen getting in. You'd get no fruit at all.

Apple trees in general don't self pollinate. That is a granny smith can't be pollinated by itself or another granny smith tree (so the resultant tree would not be a granny smith), also some varieties are sterile. I guess you would get some interesting fruit if you grew from the seeds of tree that had 3 varieties grafted to the rootstock.

The 'soak a potato to grow crinkle cut chips' idea, however, is utter nonsense.

Apples have 2 parents. The fruit grows from a flower that has been pollinated by another tree.
Bees transfer pollen between all the apple trees within about a mile, so the resulting seeds will be hybrids with all the surrounding types - including crab appleas and wild apples.

So does this mean that the same tree will

• produce different types of apples every year if the bees are pollinating from different trees and
• produce different types of apples on the same tree in a given year.

Going back to the planted granny smith - Imagine I've got a granny smith tree with two branches with flowers on.

Bee No. 1 gets pollen from a nearby Crab Apple.
Bee No 2 gets pollen from a nearby Jazz Apple

Bee No. 1 pollinates all the flowers on Branch 1.
Bee No 2 polliantes all the flowers on Branch 2. (as an example)

Does that mean on that same tree I will get
-on Branch 1 a Granny Smith + Crab Apple cross of some sort
-on Branch 2 a Granny Smith + Jazz Apple cross of some sort?

The following year Bee No 1 gets pollen from a wild apple and Bee No 2 gets pollen from another Granny Smith so that year you'd get Granny Smith + wild Apple cross and Granny Smith + Granny Smith = an actual Granny Smith.

Is that how it works in theory?

If that's right, how do commercial growers control the polination? by surrounding the trees with more trees with the right kind of pollen? or do they pollinate artificially or manually/by machine?

There is no actual Granny Smith or Jazz tree. They are made from taking branches and putting them on another tree.

There is no actual Granny Smith or Jazz tree. They are made from taking branches and putting them on another tree.

Yes I understand that. I was using it as a short hand.

So if I had a tree that was grafted with two Granny Smith variety branches then...
and it was pollinated by flowers from branches of the other varieties, is that how it works or not?

No the APPLE SEEDS will go on to produce different varieties if they are grown to adulthood.

Have a look at multi-grafted apple trees, they are proper horticultural coolness!! There was a fruit tree geek on gardeners world who had a single tree that could produce 5 (or even 7) different varieties of apples.

No the APPLE SEEDS will go on to produce different varieties if they are grown to adulthood.

But how does that sit with:

Apples have 2 parents. The fruit grows from a flower that has been pollinated by another tree.

Does this mean that the fruit on a Granny Smith branch will always look and taste like a Granny Smith every single year no matter what other pollen was used but that the seeds within each Granny Smith apple will be different depending on the pollen used?

It’s not about just which tree has pollinated it. You could have a completely controlled environment with only the one tree ever pollinating the other and it would still be a genetic lottery as to whether the trees grown from the resulting seeds would produce edible apples. Most would grow very small bitter fruit.

@Error404FucksNotFound if you genuinely have apple trees grown from seed that have edible sweet fruit then you have won the apple genetic lottery and could make some serious ££££££ from it.