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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

For those unaware, the new wave of apple varieties (juice, not space gray) are also IP-encumbered [0].

The Honeycrisp's patent seems to have expired, but varieties that you will need permission to grow: Ambrosia, Cosmic Crisp, Envy, Jazz, Kanzi, SweeTango.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/10/358530280/wa...

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Oh interesting, apparently Honeycrisp could have been a trademark, which would have allowed them to sell them indefinitely under that name excluding others from doing so, but apparently that got messed up because the name Honeycrisp was included in the patent name.

https://www.duetsblog.com/2018/09/articles/articles/if-only-...

The only way to grow any apple is to take a cutting off the tree. Apple seeds don't grow what you expect.

> Apple seeds don't grow what you expect.

Would you mind elaborating on that a bit?

Wild apples tend to be small and rather tart or bitter. Commercial varieties are not grown from seed but rather from cuttings from a mother tree somewhere. Planting Apple seeds results in apples resembling wild apples and not the cultivated variety the seeds come from.

This is because

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

>Many apples grow readily from seeds. However, more than with most perennial fruits, apples must be propagated asexually to obtain the sweetness and other desirable characteristics of the parent. This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting genes from their parents to create a new apple with parental characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents, perhaps to compete with the many pests.[51] Triploid cultivars have an additional reproductive barrier in that 3 sets of chromosomes cannot be divided evenly during meiosis, yielding unequal segregation of the chromosomes (aneuploids). Even in the case when a triploid plant can produce a seed (apples are an example), it occurs infrequently, and seedlings rarely survive.[52]

>Apples do not breed true when planted as seeds, although cuttings can take root and breed true, and may live for a century, grafting is usually used. The rootstock used for the bottom of the graft can be selected to produce trees of a large variety of sizes, as well as changing the winter hardiness, insect and disease resistance, and soil preference of the resulting tree.

To clarify, the reason you are likely ending up with a wild apple phenotype is not because that is intrinsic to the nature of apples. Otherwise, new varieties could never be developed. Crabapples are used as pollinators for farmed apples since apples aren't self fertile, and you'll end up with a hybrid. If you've got the space and the time (in this case a lot of time), breeding is a great hobby for anyone.

Another factor is that apples from seed take a lot longer to fruit, and as you mentioned, you can really control the growth characteristics of the tree with the rootstock. Unlike mangoes, the rootstock can result in the same scion variety of apple growing into a 50 foot tree or a 5 foot shrub- thats a huge amount of control!

>apples aren't self fertile

there are a few varieties which are self-fertile

Even those will tend to bear more fruit when cross pollinated, and considering how common apples and crabapples are across the US, you granny Smith or golden delicious tree is still likely to get cross pollinated by a local decorative flowering crabapple. But yeah, I guess if you grew out golden delicious in a protected greenhouse and stabilized the variety over a few generations, you might have a true from seed apple variety at the end of it

Apple trees aren't inbred - the seeds will not grow into the same variety as the parent. Usually, store bought apples will have seeds that produce inferior fruit since crabapples are used as a pollinator (apples aren't really all that self fertile) - so the seeds are hybrid crabapple seeds. You'll still get a tree that produces fruit that makes a good jam, but not great eating apples. Its not true that you're guaranteed to get an inferior quality fruit from planting a seed - otherwise we wouldn't ever develop new varieties - but the conditions that made your supermarket apple happen will result in a eating apple/crabapple hybrid more often than not. Because they don't really self pollinate, you're not going to be able to create a breed of apple that produces offspring generally identical to the parent plant, so the only way to keep a variety going is to clone it with grafting techniques.

They are all hybrids and the offspring will not have the same gene mix as the parent. You’ll end up with apples with random mixes of characteristics from the grandparent apples.

See this interesting article

“ The Gift Of Graft: New York Artist's Tree To Grow 40 Kinds Of Fruit”

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/03/337164041/th...

Stone fruits are especially easy and fun to propagate on the same tree such as this. You can do this at home and it’s fun! Beware the most vigorous variety will eventually take over the tree!

Seeds, no, but you might be able to culture any other living plant tissue into more of the same plant with the right growth media/conditions:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zx6g87h/revision/4

This technique seems hit or miss with apples.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/12538078.2010.10...

Maybe this grape cultivar was really successful with this form of propagation and the producer fears an end-user (or nation state) might do just that, but they taste so good, they went to market anyway with something they may not be able to control.

As a biologist, I assure you not any tissue or plant can be casually tissue cultured. Maybe in theory, but in practice I wouldn't want to be asked to try and turn a bit of woody apple fruit stem or sepal tissue into a viable clone!*

Far easier to just go to the farm during the right season and grab yourself a scion to graft.

*I'm getting enough of a headache from one of my side projects trying to tissue culture some plant tissue that actually has a practical purpose- I'd rather stick to grafting when I can to avoid unnecessarily complicating my life!

There are many kinds of open pollinated varieties that can be grown from seed. Many still used for cider making today. The market varieties are hybrids and won’t grow true to parents like you said. In fact, they might not set any fruit at all and you might not even know for 8 years!

Yeah I learned a whole bunch about this from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appl... (via Fark, and summarizing a book) recently:

* Johnny Appleseed planted from seed instead of grafting trees in part due due to his Swedenborgian Church beliefs

* Apples are extreme heterozygotes and each newly seeded tree produces very different apples, so you can randomly stumble on some brand-new delicious varieties among many thousands of cider-only trees

* The FBI cut down many of Johnny Appleseed's trees during Prohibition to combat hard cider production (I should probably read the source book for these claims, Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire", because this sounds kind of crazy)

SweeTango is really quite there on the edge of a freaky mutant fruit. They often have oddly shaped and deformed seed cavities, opening up into the flesh in some weird ways. Many would have parts of flesh that look transparent and saturated in juice. They are tasty, but it's in-your-face obvious they aren't naturally evolved.

A bummer with apples is that climate seems to matter. Wisconsin Honeycrisp are lame.

There's something they do to ruin varieties. I think it's either that or picking them green and gassing them for sale.

This whole thing seems perfectly reasonable to me. The analogy between DNA code and computer code seems pretty direct. They made the code, they should get the rights to the software/fruit. Don't like it? Write/selectively breed your own fruit.

You wouldn’t download an apple pie, would you?

How about no.

I would rather have companies not make new breeds because of fear of theft than deal with lawsuits/enforcement of growing food.

To take this to the obvious parallel of software patents, patents get a lot of (deserved) criticism these days, but they exist for a reason, ans serve a purpose which I think is arguably still valid. Excessive patent length and patenting trivial things is bad. So is people stealing the hard work of others. There is a sane middle ground we should be shooting for, not wiping patents out entirely to the detriment of most (arguably all, in the long run).

Incidentally these types of plant patents AND software patents are the two categories that are patentable in the USA but not in most of the rest of the world, so they definitely straddle the line of patentability.

Do you have a source for that? It looks like there are plant patents in the EU.

https://www.mewburn.com/law-practice-library/plant-variety-r...

https://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org/en/node/285

> than deal with lawsuits/enforcement of growing food.

Is there a reason why food should be treated differently than any other manufacturing process, which is also patentable? Or are you against patents in general?

I mean there's a lot of problems with patenting manufacturing processes. How do you argue this is a solid model for growing fruit?

*selling food

Big difference

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