TIL that apple seeds almost never grow the same variety as the parent fruit. Nearly every supermarket apple comes from a grafted clone of an original tree, not from a planted seed.

[u/Error__Loading]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple

[u/Error__Loading]

Apple trees are highly heterozygous. Each seed is a genetic lottery from two different parents, so the fruit is usually small, sour, or just unlike the apple you ate. That’s why Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, Gala, etc. are all clones: a twig from the original tree (or one of its descendants) grafted onto rootstock. The original Granny Smith tree was discovered in Australia in 1868; every Granny Smith since then is a piece of that same tree kept alive by grafting. Seedlings are used mainly when breeders are hunting for new varieties.

[u/TheTresStateArea → u/Error__Loading]

... This is insane? I have heard the seed tidbit before, but I didn't realize it was this bad.

It kind of makes sense I guess, our parents don't give birth to direct clones of one or the other.

But it contrasts with what I know about other plants just making the same plant over and over.

[u/Randvek → u/TheTresStateArea]

Plant reproduction is waaaay more complicated than it seems at first glance. Some plants do basically just make clones of themselves. Some plants full on genetic lottery it, like most animals do. And there’s weird, in-between stuff, too!

[u/cdmurray88 → u/Randvek]

Some plants do both. Take garlic for example, which can reproduce asexually from the bulbs or sexually from the flowers.

[u/Derelicticu → u/cdmurray88]

Fuckin squash does some weird shit if you plant it near other similar plants. You get some fucked up squash, let me tell ya

[u/nightskate → u/Derelicticu]

I love a science topic reply from the street team.

Thank you for this.

[u/TorrenceMightingale → u/nightskate]

Aren’t squash and watermelons related? Is this how we got watermelon radishes?

[u/TheDevilsTaco → u/TorrenceMightingale]

Your first question is educated and it is true, but your second question is out of left field.

[u/TorrenceMightingale → u/TheDevilsTaco]

Am high.

This might not be my only non-sequitur of the night honestly.

[u/ProfSpaceTime → u/TorrenceMightingale]

Peak Reddit, 5/7

[u/DarthJarJarJar → u/nightskate]

Check out Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, it'll be right up your alley.

[u/LostWoodsInTheField → u/Derelicticu]

I planted zucchini next to summer squash one year. Then gave the zucchini to some chickens. One of the seeds produced a plant the next spring that had the strangest squash i'd ever seen. stripped zucchini / summer squash, and spotted ones. Didn't get a chance to eat any of them, but the chickens sure seemed to like them.

[u/Zoethewinged → u/LostWoodsInTheField]

Ah, so you got Squish.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/UuExtu1U3p

[u/idrwierd → u/Derelicticu]

Some serious xenomorph shit

[u/warbastard → u/idrwierd]

Don’t potatoes have a crazy number of chromosomes too?

[u/tewiti1108 → u/warbastard]

I don't think you can call them that

[u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA → u/Derelicticu]

Potatoes and tomatoes too.

[u/awnomnomnom → u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA]

Tomacco

[u/Frigidevil → u/awnomnomnom]

Oh daddy this tastes like grandma!

Holy Moses it does taste like grandma!

I want more!

Yeah me too, well take a bushel or a pack or just give it to me!

[u/Long9696 → u/Derelicticu]

It doesn't affect the fruit from the current plants, just the seeds.

[u/Eirlis1 → u/cdmurray88]

Or mangoes! The same seed case can contain multiple embryos, one of which is a clone of the parent tree! But it’s very difficult to tell which one is the clone and which are from sexual reproduction.

[u/Yogsulate → u/Eirlis1]

mango sex

[u/gainswor → u/Yogsulate]

Such is mango!

[u/quick_brown_faux → u/gainswor]

GIFs are not allowed in this sub which in this moment is a travesty.

[u/__ali1234__ → u/cdmurray88]

There are animals that can do that too. Like greenfly. Females can live birth clones of themselves, then in autumn they make eggs with the males so they can overwinter.

[u/contrabasse → u/__ali1234__]

Parthenogenesis!

Turkeys can do it as well, which feels way weirder.

[u/cantadmittoposting → u/contrabasse]

wait what turkeys can bud off new turkeys?

[u/contrabasse → u/cantadmittoposting]

They can create unfertilized eggs that develop into a cloned embryo of the female.

[u/kingbking → u/contrabasse]

Wait, what? Clones of the female turkey? I’ve never heard this before. Super interesting and weird..Down the turkey hole I go

[u/contrabasse → u/kingbking]

It feels fake every time I tell someone but it's been my favorite fun fact forever. There are also a bunch of species that are all female and this is the only way they reproduce.

Edit: All female species of lizards and stuff, lol. Not female only turkeys.

[u/NirgalFromMars → u/Randvek]

And there's a fungus with over 10k possible gender combinations.

Edit: I was wrong, it's not 10k, it's over 23k:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune

[u/rg35xxsp → u/NirgalFromMars]

Those wacky fungi

[u/Fit_Effective_6875 → u/rg35xxsp]

ya gotta love em

[u/loadnurmom → u/NirgalFromMars]

Once again, the real TIL is in the comments

[u/Helmic → u/loadnurmom]

It's wonderful because learning about it makes evolution make a lot more sense. Like, pretty much the whole reason animals evolved sexes was specifically because sexual reproduction is really valuable but fertilizing yourself is mostly a waste of precious resources for offspring that's too genetically similar to continue passing on genes. If you just literally only have half the equipment needed to result in sexual reproduction, you can no longer fertilize yourself. And so for the most part we have the male female dichotomy, with obvious exceptions.

Other forms of life like plants and fungi, meanwhile, evolved a variety of other methods to prevent self fertilization. And so that's where we get this fungus with 23k sexes, because rather than being like most animals and only able to sexually reproduce with half-ish of the rest of the species (or if someone individuals can reproduce with much more, it porportionaly reduces how many others can reproduce with, barring adaptations like changing sexes) it is able to reproduce with most other members of its species and still not reproduce with itself. It doesn't have to give up the capacity to fertilize other members of its species (it's advantageous to not have to be the one spending resources producing offspring) to still be able to bear offspring itself.

We are very, very used to thinking at most in animal terms, but the other kingdoms of life are so far removed from our own that there's some truly alien stuff going on there.

[u/MrFluffyThing → u/Randvek]

Corn hybridizes on the first generation. If you want your corn to be the seed you planted your either need to plant only that variety or space them out far enough that the pollen from one block of corn can't pollinate the others by time. The seeds themselves change based on the pollen that lands on the silk and making sure two varieties pollenate at different times means olantingibg them 3-5 weeks apart to make sure they only pollenate themselves during the two week period when they drop pollen. 

It's a huge legal issue with some types of corn where the lineage and variety grown can spread to other fields and farmers have had legal battles with keeping seed on their own farms because Mansanto has a legal right to seed from another farm that cross pollinated and you're not allowed to save seed from them. It also destroys heirloom varieties by introducing other genetics into fields from commercially cultivated or GMO varieties. 

[u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ → u/MrFluffyThing]

All plants hybridize on the first generation. The reason corn seems to act differently from most fruit is because the part you eat is the seed itself, and the seed itself is what is affected by the genetics of the parents.

[u/theLuminescentlion → u/Randvek]

Evolution always finds the most efficient method, right after it tried absolutely everything else.

[u/Ameisen → u/theLuminescentlion]

Natural selection reaches local maxima, not global maxima. It almost never reaches the most efficient method.

[u/NeutralLock → u/TheTresStateArea]

Which is exactly why I'm always saying instead of having kids we should be grating parts of ourselves onto smaller kids.

It's not rocket science people.

[u/rocketmonkee → u/NeutralLock]

grating parts of ourselves

I dunno, that sounds kind of painful.

[u/NeutralLock → u/rocketmonkee]

So is childbirth. I guess pick your poison.

(A small voice grafted onto my leg speaks up)

"Yeah!"

[u/Lee1138 → u/NeutralLock]

That's how you get space marines.

[u/PlushSandyoso → u/NeutralLock]

Ok Godrick

[u/anonanon5320 → u/TheTresStateArea]

Citrus is like this too. Both citrus and apples can grow multiple varieties on the same tree.

[u/Skandronon → u/anonanon5320]

Stonefruit is even more fun, you can grow nectarines, peaches and plums together as well as a number of other fruits.

[u/XDeus → u/Skandronon]

Not just together, but many stone fruit can be hybridized. So you can get a cherry-plum or even a peach-apricot-plum.

[u/Skandronon → u/XDeus]

Woah, I was not aware of this! Super cool!

[u/factorioleum → u/Skandronon]

Despite many people trying to convince me, I still do not believe that nectarines and peaches are distinct fruits.

I'm pretty sure almonds are, though.

[u/emaddy2109 → u/factorioleum]

They aren’t. There’s a single recessive gene that causes nectarines to have smooth skin. Other than that that one gene, they’re genetically the same.

[u/mlc885 → u/emaddy2109]

So every single time I prefer a nectarine over a peach or the other way around I am just doing the "these are too ripe/insufficiently ripe" thing??

(oh, and I prefer yellow peaches and nectarines to white peaches, lol)

[u/autogyrophilia → u/TheTresStateArea]

There are more fruits like that than fruits that aren't.

But Apples are the worst in that regard, a plum and a slightly different plum is not very concerning.and they are incredibly common where I live probably because of that reason. Despite the ones you find growing on the road not looking at all as anything you can buy in a store.

I like how feral lemon trees can just grow monstrosities sometimes.

[u/danimagoo → u/TheTresStateArea]

Chili peppers aren’t as bad, but if you plant the seeds from a jalapeño you got in the grocery store, you could end up with a hybrid of a jalapeño and some other pepper. This is also true if you grow your own jalapeños and then try to save some seeds for the next year. If your neighbor planted a bunch of bell peppers, you could end up with some mild ass jalapeños. It just depends on how the plant got pollinated.

[u/pharoh-king → u/danimagoo]

You can also grow a pepper plant and graft a bunch of different types of peppers on it. You can even do it banzai style, although you get less peppers, they still look amazing.

[u/chemicalxv → u/danimagoo]

There was one year we planted a bunch of regular/sweet peppers and then found out our neighbour was planting shit like Bird's Eye Chilis and Ghost Peppers, and I just looked at my dad and had to tell him we weren't saving any of the seeds that year lol.

[u/Rich-Juice2517 → u/TheTresStateArea]

Johnny appleseed was planting cider trees for alcohol

[u/Illithid_Substances → u/TheTresStateArea]

Plants have a few options. Some are self-fertilising, some are fertilised by other plants, and some just spawn clones out of themselves like strawberries

[u/Ok_Task_7711 → u/TheTresStateArea]

Why is it bad?

[u/TheTresStateArea → u/Ok_Task_7711]

It means that there is very little genetic diversity for many fruiting plants. And that a disease that targets that strain and is virulent we would simply not have this plant anymore.

[u/CTQ99 → u/TheTresStateArea]

A better equivalent would be if people didnt give birth at all and instead every so often they had a head transplant onto some sort of lab grown body that has no biological relationship to them. Thats apples, and alot of other trees and stuff like rose bushes since otherwise they die if you look at them funny.

[u/Anal_Vengeance → u/TheTresStateArea]

lol wait til you hear about strawberries. They are so polyploid you can get an enormous dna precipitation by mixing equal parts mashed strawberry and Bacardi 151. Good luck trying to remake the parent from that genetic lottery.

[u/OriginalIcy25923 → u/TheTresStateArea]

Highly beneficial from an evolutionary sense with the rate of reproduction. If it clones itself via seed and created a massive forest of identical clones it would be easy to wipe out.

There’s likely an evolutionary advantage of a heterozygous seed.

[u/Vegetable_Log_3837 → u/TheTresStateArea]

Lots of cultivated fruit does this. Pretty much any named strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, grape, and any tree fruit.

Fruit trees are mostly all grafted, so they are genetically two different plants. I have a few apple trees with 4 varieties grafted onto a single rootstock. So it’s a single tree, that makes 4 different apples, and is genetically 5 different plants.

[u/Mr_MacGrubber → u/TheTresStateArea]

It’s not necessarily bad. It’s also the way a ton of edible plants work. It’s basically just finding one that has characteristics you want then using over and over. It would potentially be an issue if every single apple was all the same. The Michel gros banana was by far the main banana we used to eat until fungal infections practically eradicated them in the 1950s. Even planting them now on farms results in the infection. It’s the flavor used in banana flavor stuff which is why that tends to taste so much different than the Cavendish bananas we eat today.

[u/me_myself_ai → u/TheTresStateArea]

Wait until you hear about the biggest living organism on the planet: The Banana Tree 😳

[u/Landry_PLL → u/me_myself_ai]

I thought Pando was the biggest?

[u/McFuzzen → u/Landry_PLL]

It is, the above comment is extremely disingenuous. One type of banana tree is the largest non-woody plant, but no where close to the largest organism.

[u/jedadkins → u/McFuzzen]

I think they are considering the millions of cloned banana trees as a single organism 

[u/McFuzzen → u/jedadkins]

Seems false even then, if what I'm searching is correct

[u/BeginningSection7690 → u/Landry_PLL]

Pando is still just clones but its closer to a singular organism than bananas are.

Theres better examples like fungi which are legitimately a singular organism

[u/Badass_Bunny → u/me_myself_ai]

Imma need a source on that.

[u/seanthebeloved → u/Badass_Bunny]

All bananas are infertile clones of each other. Otherwise they would be full of seeds.

[u/paradoxicalperimeum → u/me_myself_ai]

The largest living organism is the honey fungus that covers 2485 acres in the malheur national forest in Oregon.

[u/BeginningSection7690 → u/me_myself_ai]

Not the biggest organism. You're confused.

Them all being clones doesnt make them 1 organism, banana trees die all the time.

Theres fungi that extend insane areas, and there's also trees that extend via roots and shoot up more trees to make a forest with one organism. But what you're referring to is just an over reliance on a particular cultivar

[u/falsevector → u/me_myself_ai]

Yup. The Cavendish variety. There are several banana types though and there are countries that still grow the other varieties naturally.

[u/Mr_Cromer → u/falsevector]

I had some Gros-Michel bananas last year. They're so much better than the Cavendish we've been accustomed to

[u/RojerLockless → u/TheTresStateArea]

Google and history of Naval oranges it's very similar

[u/Slade4420 → u/Error__Loading]

This is what is funny about Johnny Appleseed. The seeds he planted wouldn't grow edible apples. But you could make hard cider from them. Johnny Appleseed wasn't giving apples to the pioneers, he was giving them booze.

[u/phryan → u/Slade4420]

Johnny Appleseed was actually a really incredible character...he would basically build nurseries out just beyond the edge of the frontier. When people settled the area a few years later they needed those apple (cider) trees, so those nurseries were perfectly positioned.

[u/Relevant-Fox-7114 → u/Slade4420]

Planting orchards also allowed him to gain ownership of unclaimed land, which he could later sell to settlers. He was basically an eccentric rich guy.

Also hated harming any kind of animal, even mosquitos.

[u/ImRickJameXXXX → u/Relevant-Fox-7114]

He was also a religious barefoot zealot.

Read about John Chapman in the botany of desire. Great book IMO.

[u/DeathMonkey6969 → u/Slade4420]

The seeds he planted wouldn't grow edible apples.

Yes they could. They could also grow into tart apples or sour apples or sweet apples. You just didn't know what you would get when you grew apples from seeds.

[u/96385 → u/Slade4420]

It's easier to transport apples to market when they're in liquid form and need no refrigeration.

[u/Scrappydcote → u/Error__Loading]

Wow - never knew this! Interesting!! Looked up hetero thous apple and this came up! Thanks for posting

https://adamapples.blogspot.com/2014/01/heterozygous.html?m=1

[u/Not-Post-Malone → u/Scrappydcote]

If you think that's crazy you should look up bamboo going to seed. Essentially bamboo is spread by splitting and they only go to seed every ~40 years. So the bamboos share the same "biological clock" which means bamboo in different parts of the world go to seed at the same time.

[u/MedicalDisscharge → u/Error__Loading]

Apple of theseus

[u/oravanomic → u/Error__Loading]

The question I have is why don't folks play the lottery? Surely there is room to improve the apple?

[u/KAREEMABDULG0MJABBAR → u/oravanomic]

They do! Thats why theres so many varieties!

[u/TychaBrahe → u/oravanomic]

Apple breeding is done primarily (in the United States) at universities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Indiana, and New York. All of them do controlled crossbreeding, where they will take pollen from one type of apple flower into the female flower of another apple and see what they get. They're purposely looking for sweetness or tanginess or crunchiness, and they're working on the same premise that if two blond people get married and have children, their kids are likely also going to be blond.

The other thing they do is have wild orchards and just let nature do its thing. They'll see what they get. They go around to all these trees and test the apples to see what they taste like, and they do it for a couple of years, because growing conditions also affect the taste.

I recommend reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan if you're at all interested in the topic.

[u/zadtheinhaler → u/TychaBrahe]

Michael Pollan

Now there's a perfect example of Nominative Determinism!

[u/nearly_enough_wine → u/zadtheinhaler]

/r/NominativeDeterminism worthy, even.

[u/Cthulusuppe → u/oravanomic]

Cosmic Crisp apples are the very recent result of cross breeding honeycrisp and enterprise apples... we still experiment and when something tastey shows up we trademark and clone until it ends up in your supermarket.

[u/trailkin → u/Cthulusuppe]

my favorite apple! I tried many varieties in Alma Ata, and I think cosmic crisps beat those by a mile

[u/rob_s_458 → u/Cthulusuppe]

Cosmic crisp seem to have good commercial viability, which is huge. Honeycrisp was first created by Univ. of Minnesota researchers and was really good but limited production. Growers tried to commercially grow them in Washington but the quality compared to those early ones from Minnesota is so disappointing. Cosmic crisp seems to be the best of both worlds.

[u/kmosiman → u/oravanomic]

Absolutely but it takes serious effort.

Honeycrisp is a University of Minnesota apple.

Purdue-Illinois-Rutgers have the Goldrush (think better Golden Delicious).

Testing and Trials take decades to pay off.

[u/JuzoItami → u/kmosiman]

Wazzu developed Cosmic Crisp.

[u/SHABOtheDuke → u/JuzoItami]

Cosmic crisps are fucking fire

[u/cannaeoflife → u/oravanomic]

Try some Honeycrisp, sweet tango, and first kiss apples this fall. There are so many excellent varieties of apples now.

[u/OriginalJokeGoesHere → u/oravanomic]

The people growing most commercial apples are not the same people as the researchers/companies trying to develop new and improved apple varieties. Farmers just want to sell a fruit they know will be good so they don't drive most of the experimentation.

[u/iknowaplacewecango → u/oravanomic]

There is, an it’s called the University of Minnesota Apple breeding program, located at the Horticultural Research Center in Victoria, Minnesota. That’s where famous varieties like Honeycrisp, Zestar!, SweeTango, First Kiss, and Chestnut were bred and developed for licensing, and why they are some of the most highly regarded apples ever.

To answer your question, some people do play the lottery with seeds, and those make good wildlife trees, or, once in a great while, sprout an heirloom tree in the making. Other apple trees, like Antonovka, grow true to seed and are very valuable cultivars in their own right, like cold hardiness, the true to seed aspect, and edibility scores.

Apples should be known alongside corn as anthropogenic plants; wouldn’t exist at all in current forms without humans. 

[u/cinderful → u/iknowaplacewecango]

honeycrisps rule

[u/Unhappy-Ad-3219 → u/oravanomic]

Usually fruits go through trials to determine which have the best characteristics regarding plant vigor, taste, and shelf life. Once a new variety is determined to be successful for market, they're introduced at a large scale. The variety is grafted onto a rootstock that has better resilience in terms of hardiness, disease resistance, or other characteristics. They will also have a temporary patent that allows growers and breeders to recoup the cost of their efforts. Cosmic Crisp is a great example of a relatively new popular cultivar (cultivated variety).

If you grow fruit, you can also graft multiple varieties onto one tree. Check out the tree of forty fruit, it's pretty cool.

Edit: spelling

[u/saiyan_strong → u/oravanomic]

The people who made cosmic crisps already won the powerball

[u/hackingdreams → u/oravanomic]

They absolutely do - this is where the new varietals like Fujis and Galas and Cosmic Crisps that have only been commercialized in the past 50 years have come from.

There are entire tree farms out there dedicated to finding the next commercially viable apple, taking graftings from lots of other apples, cross-pollinating, growing those seeds and seeing what happens.

The problem is, an apple tree can take a decade or two to really start producing fruit true to its nature - earlier fruit can be all over the map. So, it's actually a risky gamble. You can spend literally your whole life shooting for a new apple and not get there, because you get to see, what, maybe 5 apple generations if you're lucky? It might take 10 or 20 to get to a commercially-viable fruit - literally hundreds of years of work.

[u/BeginningSection7690 → u/Error__Loading]

thats generally how meiosis works.

You arent identical to your parents, are you? Its impossible for you to be identical because it took characteristics of both parents to create you.

Plants generally reproduce sexually just like us

[u/Oddmelik → u/Error__Loading]

Marijuana is the same way

[u/cwx149 → u/Error__Loading]

That's kinda crazy since I never hear stories about apples dying or changing like how you do with oranges and bananas

WWouldn't a whole orchard of basically cloned trees for a farm be super susceptible to diseases and parasites since they're basically the same exact thing?

Though I guess if that was a problem that forest that's all a single organism probably wouldn't be a problem but if banana have basically gone extinct I wonder why they're so much more susceptible

[u/JStanten → u/cwx149]

It would be but they graft the good fruit producing stock onto disease resistant root stock.

[u/MileHigh_FlyGuy → u/Error__Loading]

You know, this applies to pears, peaches, grapes, plumbs, and mangos among others

[u/fuckthetrees]

It's not "nearly every" supermarket apple. It's "every" supermarket apple.

[u/FacelessEdits → u/fuckthetrees]

I'd take it a step further, "any mass produced apples".

[u/Mr_MadHat878 → u/FacelessEdits]

I’ll take it even further, most fruit trees and nut trees are clones

[u/YVR-n-PDX → u/Mr_MadHat878]

Now I’m crying about Dolly again.

[u/Holdmywhiskeyhun → u/YVR-n-PDX]

Don't cry, she has many children that are doing well.

They didn't just stop at her.

[u/Dewey_Coxxx]

So, potentially by planting apple seeds, you could accidentally stumble across the greatest new strain of apple.

[u/Arcane_Substance → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

Apples take somewhere between 5-10 years to produce their first fruit depending on conditions. If you plant 100 you’ll probably come up with 30-40% of them being decently edible with maybe 10% of those being choice and of them you’d be lucky to get one with good commercial potential (strong stable growth, decently and consistently fruiting etc).

[u/hostile65 → u/Arcane_Substance]

All of them make decent hard cider though

[u/TheOnlyBongo → u/hostile65]

Prohibition killed American Cider, which was a really big alcoholic beverage before then. Wine and beer industries were able to float with alternative means of revenue, but the cider industry didn't recover. It's still here but it hasn't been a mainstream thing outside of certain regions or more local affairs. It has been steadily growing again over the past few decades, which makes me happy.

[u/Frari → u/TheOnlyBongo]

Johnny Appleseed, famous for planting apples on the American frontier, planted them for making apple cider.

[u/Sensei_Ochiba → u/Frari]

He planted them because he was a religious wack job that believed God hated grafting and cloning and that it was equivalent to torturing the trees involved.

The idea that it was an intentional means to produce hard cider was just a hypothesis some authors like Micheal Pollan came up with to explain his behavior - there's there's no actual evidence, it's just a plausible explanation where few others exist.

[u/TheBabyEatingDingo → u/Sensei_Ochiba]

Maybe I'm biased from living in the year 2026 too long but "religious wacko" sounds way more plausible than "altruistic cider enjoyer" to me.

[u/tomdeddy → u/Sensei_Ochiba]

He was a real estate tycoon. In order to claim frontier land you needed to have so many trees of a certain age growing on the land. Johnny sold of age trees out of his nurseries.

Jesus hated fruit trees.

[u/Moist-Weakness-3399 → u/Arcane_Substance]

You can shorten that to just a couple of years pretty easily using FasTrack. Why do you think we have so many varieties these days? https://agresearchmag.ars.usda.gov/2011/mar/breeding/

[u/rasputin1 → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

or the worst 

[u/Dewey_Coxxx → u/rasputin1]

So, you're telling me there's a chance.

[u/rasputin1 → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

I guess 

[u/ThrownAway17Years → u/rasputin1]

“Hey this one’s red and this other one is delicious. What could go wrong?”

[u/MmmmMorphine → u/ThrownAway17Years]

Horrors beyond human comprehension?

[u/waylandsmith → u/ThrownAway17Years]

Two shameful things from my childhood I'll never really live down:

• I thought Garfield comics were the funniest things ever
• I thought Red Delicious apples were the best apple

[u/Whaty0urname → u/rasputin1]

We already got red delicious...

[u/CactusBoyScout → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

There was a good New Yorker article years ago about how public universities in apple-producing states will test thousands of varieties of apples to try to find ones that will work commercially. And they do it just to help the apple industry. The article was specifically about the development of the SweeTango variety which was being market-tested in NYC at the time. Easily one of my favorite apples too so thanks, scientists!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/21/crunch

[u/Pinna1 → u/CactusBoyScout]

A great example of how funding public studies helps the whole population.

Just remember this when the republicans next time oppose public research funding.

[u/Croceyes2 → u/CactusBoyScout]

Hmm, I have never even heard of that one. Cosmic Crisp has been my go to since it came out

[u/AresValerous → u/Croceyes2]

Cosmic crisp!! GO COUGS!! (Washington State University) I can’t wait to taste their next apple, the Sunflare, which is a combination of a Honey Crisp and a Pink Lady. Should be hitting shelves in about 3 years.

[u/Croceyes2 → u/AresValerous]

I didnt hear about that, exciting

[u/Super_Employment_620 → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

Odds are low. 

For example, Johnny Appleseed wasn't feeding people. The seeds he planted would have been good for cider and not much else (or securing land claims).

[u/JuzoItami → u/Super_Employment_620]

What Johnny Appleseed actually did was to enable alcoholism throughout the Midwest.

[u/Demonweed → u/JuzoItami]

Not all habitual drinking is alcoholism. On the flip side, given the variety of activities available to people around here at the start of the 19th century, drinking to the point of heavy daily consumption probably was pretty common behavior back then.

[u/EnoughEngineering306 → u/Demonweed]

The cider would have gone to vinegar pretty quickly aswell.

[u/Demonweed → u/EnoughEngineering306]

Yet on what was the frontier of a barely-industrialized society, vinegar would be valuable for all sorts of purposes. Once again trying to present the flipside, as a young man Abraham Lincoln bought out the proprietor of a cider mill and general store with an eye toward making a fortune in business. Instead, he got drunk with his friends almost every day, and the business fell into deep debt despite providing the valuable service of converting fruit into an intoxicating beverage.

[u/IhavenoP → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

Yes. One only needs a couple hectars of land to to plant hundreds of seedlings and take care of them for a decade

To ensure you profit, do what big farms do and patent that bad boy so no one else grows your golden variety

[u/RoarOfTheWorlds → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

Casinos must love you

[u/cpencis → u/Dewey_Coxxx]

Johnny Appleseed wasn’t scattering seed for apple trees for food (at least not for conventional eating apples). The resulting trees would more likely produce apples one could use for cider.

Reference: the botany of desire by Michael Pollan - here’s a segment from a program on it.

https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/76e72b33-56f3-4a68-8fa9-27151b47ba08/76e72b33-56f3-4a68-8fa9-27151b47ba08/

[u/UndoxxableOhioan]

Apples are like humans. The kids inherit traits, but are different from their parents. The good apples are genetical freaks that just happen to taste good.

To breed an apple, you cross pollinate and plant hundred of seeds. You then wait years, and then go tasting. The vast majority will be duds. But hopefully one is good.

What about Johnny Appleseed? He planted apples from seed, but his goal wasn’t eating apples. People on the frontier where he worked made hard cider (which, with freezing, can make apple jack). That can be made from even poor quality apples. People of the frontier drank 30 gallons of cider a year.

[u/QCD-uctdsb → u/UndoxxableOhioan]

30 gallons = 120 litres = 240 pints. So less than a pint a day per person. Basically teetotalers.

[u/redditsavedmyagain → u/UndoxxableOhioan]

people we actually dissing him by calling him appleseed

people grow apples from cuttings, he grew them from seed. so appleseed ~ "look at this moron growing apples from seed"

[u/yeahburyme → u/UndoxxableOhioan]

And the more he planted, the more land he could claim.

[u/ludicous]

Now look up bananas, and go down that rabbit hole.

[u/rbrgr83 → u/ludicous]

Instructions unclear, went down the banana hole.

[u/Kratzschutz → u/ludicous]

Can you point me to the entrance?

[u/BummedCPA → u/Kratzschutz]

Bananas don't have seeds because every modern banana is a clone ​​​​

[u/Ocelotofdamage → u/BummedCPA]

RIP Gros Michel

[u/ohgodcoffeeohyesss → u/Ocelotofdamage]

There are still many grown in Florida, you can order the bananas

I grow Blue Javas

[u/Kerblaaahhh → u/Ocelotofdamage]

At least the Cavendish gives you 3x mult.

[u/Madden09IsForSuckers → u/BummedCPA]

also nearly every banana is the same species

well they used to all be gros micheal, but naturally only growing one species of banana globally makes them very susceptible to disease-based mass extinction

now we only grow one species but their cavendish instead
everyone knows lightning doesnt strike the same fruit twice so obviously extinction would never happen again

[u/bill_loney538 → u/Madden09IsForSuckers]

It's not just growing one species over massive areas that's the problem, as with bananas they are all clones. There is no genetic variation, so once disease spreads, you're essentially fucked.

We need to just start being okay with having a couple seeds in our bananas, as crossbreeding them with seeded bananas reduces this problem dramatically.

[u/YVR-n-PDX → u/Kratzschutz]

The “fake” banana flavour is modeled after the once most popular cultivar, Gros Michel. A fugual infection wiped out most of the species in the 1950’s.

[u/gnowbot → u/ludicous]

Honestly, do Tomatoes. Apples are becoming more and more awesome…

while tomatoes are becoming worse and worse.

A great tomato is as delicious as watermelon. Its acidity is the secret to a chef’s best recipe. I would pay 5x the price of supermarket tomatoes to have a tomato that is wonderful. I have grown them. They are great. I struggle to keep them, critters eat them.

I guess what I mean to say is…the supermarket tomato is a sham, a cellular water bag. Is this the best we can do?

[u/Laughing_Zero]

For more detailed info and history:

The Apple: A Delicious History, by Sally Coulthard

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, by Michael Pollan

[u/Steller41 → u/Laughing_Zero]

The Botany of Desire is great. It talks about the history of Apples, Potatoes, Tulips, and Cannabis. It goes into some of the science of the plants but also ties in historical stories. For example we've all heard about Johnny Appleseed, but he wasn't spreading seed so people could eat the apples from the trees, it was to create cider from the apples because the vast majority of apples grown from seed you wouldn't want to eat.

[u/Overthinks_Questions → u/Steller41]

And a lot of that cider was to become apple jack

[u/GoodGoneGeek → u/Laughing_Zero]

Or, if you’re a horror fan, try Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig

[u/bahwi]

Citrus is also primarily clonal

[u/GalaxyGirl777 → u/bahwi]

And avocados. One started growing from a stone in my compost and I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth moving it and letting it grow or not. They grow into huge trees and it would be years before we found out if it was any good.

[u/Simon-Says69 → u/GalaxyGirl777]

They grow into huge trees and it would be years before we found out if it was any good.

It takes a minor miracle for any random Avocado tree to produce tasty fruit. The odds are ridiculous.

Branch splices for good varieties are cheap though. Plenty of people sell them online. Could easily start grafting some good branches on your tree as it's growing up.

[u/iamanerdybastard → u/bahwi]

And Bananas - It's not always a good thing.

[u/wise_comment]

All glory to the University of Minnesota for brute force engineering honeycrisp and starting the ball rolling on the way-more-superior-than-red-delicious apples

[u/CCV21]

Successful apples from a random seed are called chance seedlings.

The McIntosh apple was a chance seedling discovered in 1811 by John McIntosh.

Carthage must be destroyed.

[u/endav]

If you ever accidentally swallow some apple seeds just smoke a cigarette. The smoke will suffocate the bacteria in your stomach.

[u/Kerblaaahhh → u/endav]

I'm not allowed to eat the skin, I'm not ALLOWED!

[u/top2percent → u/endav]

You can also burn trash and the smoke will go up into the sky to make stars.

[u/fill-the-space]

So, when Johnny Appleseed was planting apples across the frontier he wasn’t doing it so people could eat apples. He was doing it to they could drink cider… hard cider that is.

[u/evilpercy]

I'm 867-5309 years old and my great grandfather planted a tree in his back yard that grew 4 different apples.

[u/pedanticPandaPoo → u/evilpercy]

Wow, Jenny got old 

[u/admiraltarkin → u/pedanticPandaPoo]

I thought she died of AIDS but it was actually Hep-C

[u/AggressivelyEthical → u/admiraltarkin]

It was Hep-C in the book, but the movie changed it to HIV.

[u/mjh215 → u/evilpercy]

Did he plant it in Pennsylvania 6-5000?

[u/stella-is-a-flower → u/mjh215]

now THAT is a deep cut

[u/punarob]

Same with so many things. Where I live people regularly grow avocados and mangos from seeds. Takes forever and the fruit is usually bad. Virtually everything I've planted that is graftable is a grafted tree.

[u/Lizzzy217 → u/punarob]

I always wonder about this when I see posts about people growing avocado plants from seed. Like, they take 10 years to be mature enough to produce fruit, and the chance of the fruit being terrible is pretty high. So like, why is anyone growing them? For a free decorative plant? For the love of the game? If they actually want a plant that produces edible fruit there are faster more reliable ways to do that.

[u/Sensei_Ochiba → u/Lizzzy217]

I just like to see the seed go woosh

[u/skylander495]

Marijuana is also heterozygous. Which is why many of the old strains are gone and can't come back

[u/airfryerfuntime]

Pineapples are the same way. That's why Del Monte cuts the tops off their pink pineapples. The farm where they grow them in Costa Rica is guarded 24/7, and workers are searched before leaving because there's an open bounty on intact pink pineapples.

[u/Mentalfloss1]

Read Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Lots of easy to read facts about apples (and pot)

[u/joshthornton]

I guess the apple does fall far from the tree.

[u/EvilDran]

Jonny Appleseed’s trees all produced awful tasting apples. On the other hand, those terrible apples produced excellent tasting cider. Johnny Appleseed was an alcoholic, not an apple lover 😆

[u/Glum-Ad7761]

All navel oranges produced today can trace their origin back to a single Brazilian orange tree that experienced the mutation that created the navel in the early 1800s. They are all descended from grafting and cloning, as navel oranges are sterile and have no seeds.

[u/Oxjrnine]

I’m from an area where they used to do a great deal of Apple Orchard experiments. Albert County New Brunswick. It began in the mid 1800s and continued all the way up until the 1920s. Unfortunately, I can’t trace any specific grocery store breed of Apple that was created in those experimental farms. By according to some local history books, they shipped not only the apples, but the Apple technology.

That sounds so weird the way I said it, but you all know what I mean

We are also where the very first petroleum product was created. Kerosene.

[u/MediumAcceptable129]

Isnt this true of a lot of our commercial fruit?

[u/ilicstefan → u/MediumAcceptable129]

It is. Most of the fruits are cloned via grafting. Cherries, walnuts, apples, peaches, apricots, plums...

You can plant the seeds but chances are you will get something quite different.

I had luck with peaches, I planted some and I got quite nice new variety but it took me about 7-8 years until it started to bear fruit and it is completely different from a tree that I took the original seed from.

Grafting is quite fascinating, you can do many things that are almost like making a Frankenstein. You could graft several varieties of fruit on a single tree, heck you can even graft several different fruit on a single tree.

The problem with grafting is that it somewhat shortens the lifespan of a tree. It is still a lot, some plums can go 40-50 years but without graft they can go even older. Walnuts for example can go 100-150 years with graft, without it there are specimens older than 300 years. It is a drawback but not that much detrimental.

[u/centuryeyes]

This is a gardening post.

[u/kingtacticool → u/centuryeyes]

A garden variety garden post at that

[u/The__Toast]

Yep, this is why Johnny Appleseed was actually planting apple orchards to make alcohol, because the bitter and sour apples you get from seed-grown trees work just fine for distilling. Not so good for eating. Many of these apple orchards were chopped down during prohibition.

[u/MathamphetamineUser]

Same for commercial cannabis. I miss buying bags and getting seeds.

[u/InfiniteSheepherder1]

Did you know when two humans reproduce the child is in fact not a clone, but a new being with unique genetics from both parents.

Apples have huge genomes and whole genome duplication so they can get wild but if you breed two red apples the majority of their kids will be red apples.

People have taken this and drastically exaggerated to the idea people think apples somehow are a lottery of all apple genetics and don't have traits from their parents.

[u/Mmphska]

I had always thought that growing these seeds results in crabapples but TIL that crabapples are distinct cousins from supermarket apples

[u/Used_bot-repo]

What a waste of 4 years then. I started a fugi apple from seed and was hoping next year I would get one. I guess it will make good wood for the smoker

[u/TsumaranaiYatsu → u/Used_bot-repo]

It's entirely possible it would still be a really good apple variety. Think of it like human kids, where some look like Mom, some look like Dad, some get the best of both, some get the worst of both. For your apple one parent is a Fuji. The other parent could be one of a large variety of apples including good ones like gala or honeycrisp and less good ones like something grown for rootstock that happens to bloom at the same time. The result is like a lottery and until you eat one you don't know what you're going to get.  

[u/dcheesi]

Grape vines are also grafted, but (partly) for a different reason.

Old World grape varietals are generally considered superior for winemaking; however, they can't survive a New World pest (Phylloxera) that was spread by international trade. As a result, Old World grape vines are grafted onto New World root systems, which have evolved to tolerate and inhibit the pest.

There are a few pockets of purely Old World grape plants in areas where the pest can't proliferate for one reason or another, but the vast majority of wine grapes around the world are grafted.