Most fruit lovers know that of all the fruits out there, apples enjoy the distinction of having the greatest variety.\u00a0 They are the nearly the only fruit or vegetable in the grocery aisle where variety is a major selling point.\u00a0 Apples can taste sweet or tart, be snappy or mushy, hold their shape when cooked or just fall apart.\u00a0 There are literally thousands of varieties of apples, with nearly 100 in common cultivation.<\/p>\n
If you were to plant the seeds of an apple, you are very likely to end up with something that is not like the fruit it came from.\u00a0 I recently saw a picture of the actual fruit produced from seedlings that all came from the same tree.\u00a0 The fruit were incredibly diverse ranging in color from gold to red, and from small to large (I couldn’t taste them, but would be willing to bet that the taste was equally inconsistent).\u00a0 So if apples don\u2019t grow reliably from seed, how do apple growers produce a consistent product?<\/p>\n
The answer was discovered over a hundred years ago as growers tried to \u201cmove\u201d varieties from one place to another.\u00a0 It turns out that apples are very tough plants and they can be grafted easily.\u00a0 The graft is accomplished by taking tender bud wood (called the scion) from the desired plant, and inserting it into a freshly cut slit under the bark of the host apple tree.\u00a0 When done correctly, the cells of the host and scion merge nicely at the graft, and allow the scion to continue growing into an exact replica of its original parent.\u00a0 This is a kind of clonal reproduction that guarantees that there is no change to the variety over time.\u00a0 A variation of this on small nursery trees is called budding, and it is pretty much the only way that apples are propagated today.<\/p>\n
If we look back at the apples in common usage 200 years ago, they are typically soft, have thick skins, have rough patches on their skin called russetting, have a very short window for harvest, don\u2019t store well, and generally wouldn\u2019t compete well with today\u2019s varieties in the grocery aisle.\u00a0 But once there was a good solution in place to maintain and exactly propagate a variety, there was a lot of effort put into breeding.<\/p>\n
Apple breeding is a very long term process taking anywhere between 15-30 years for results of a cross to be well understood.\u00a0 New varieties usually come about in 3 ways: sexual crossing between existing varieties; volunteer seedlings that are \u201cfound\u201d; and genetic mutations of existing apple wood.<\/p>\n
Sexual crossing is a slow process because even with parent seeds from the same apple, the \u201cchild\u201d trees may yield apples that are very different from each other.\u00a0 Each seed must be grown to a mature tree before only the best trees are kept for future crosses or commercial propagation.\u00a0 For example,\u00a0the popular variety Honeycrisp was actually bred in the 60’s, so long ago that\u00a0records of its exact parentage have been lost. \u00a0Nonetheless, this is the process whereby almost all brand new varieties are grown.\u00a0 It is a slow, expensive process that is leading the industry to some major changes.\u00a0 More about that in my next post.<\/p>\n
The second method mentioned is where seedlings trees are identified as being somehow worthy of saving.\u00a0 An example of this is the variety \u201cYork\u201d which is still considered an excellent baking and processing apple.\u00a0 It was found growing near York PA nearly 100 years ago, and saved.<\/p>\n
The third method is very often used to improve an existing variety.\u00a0 It is pretty common in an orchard to come upon a limb that acts a little differently than the rest of the tree.\u00a0 Its apples may ripen earlier, or they may be redder, or they may taste a little different.\u00a0 These \u201csports\u201d are often identified by alert growers, and cuttings shipped to nurseries to serve as a cultivar of the parent variety.\u00a0 This can cause a variety to change fairly quickly due to human-selected preferences in a variety.<\/p>\n
For example, throughout the second half of the 20th<\/sup> century, Red Delicious was continuously selected for improvements to color and shape, such that the most modern strains are almost always 100% dark red with a pointy shape;\u00a0 unfortunately the selection process also diminished the flavor of America\u2019s favorite apple variety.\u00a0 Gala has also changed: what started as a red blush over a yellow base has now been selected to be another red apple.\u00a0 Fortunately, the taste has remained unchanged.<\/p>\n Future posts will examine the future of apple breeding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most fruit lovers know that of all the fruits out there, apples enjoy the distinction of having the greatest variety.\u00a0 They are the nearly the only fruit or vegetable in the grocery aisle where variety is a major selling point.\u00a0 Apples can taste sweet or tart, be snappy or mushy, hold their shape when cooked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}