New variety of apple discovered by Wiltshire runner
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What's the meaning of the word 'variety' then? What is its use if 'different variety' is just the same as 'different individual plant' if every seed produces a different variety. Surely 'variety' must have more meaning than that?
Apples are not like that. Each plant grown from seed is vastly different from the mother plant, and you don't even know what the father plant is, because it could be an apple, a crab apple, a quince, etc. Most of these random plants are useless for fruit. And so, for apples we use the name "variety" to mean clones of one single plant. So, all "bramley" apple trees are clones of the original bramley apple tree in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, UK. This is done by taking a cutting of the tree, and grafting it onto a specially grown root.
So when someone says they have found a new variety of apple, what they actually mean is that they found an apple tree that grew from seed, and it actually looks and tastes nice, and therefore might be worth cloning and spreading around the world.
Without all of that, it could perhaps find itself a niche spot in specialty orchards if it tastes amazing or otherwise piques people's attention. There are a few thousand varieties grown that way. But a lot of those are in danger of disappearing if people lose interest, and we've already lost thousands of named varieties of apple.
To really take off it needs to be friendly to farmers in all of the ways I mentioned, or they just won't grow it.
> It needs to be shippable without bruising.
I thought all apples bruised easily, are there degrees of bruisability? (on reflection, comparing a quince and a pear to an apple, I suppose that makes sense).
> It needs to take well to grafting.
Interesting - some don't? I'd not have guessed that, I just unthinkingly assumed they'd all be about the same. (I knew a guy who told me his dad had grafted a pineapple to an orange tree. He was very young).
> It needs to be resistant to pests and diseases,
Very good point. Hadn't considered it. If it managed in hedgerows there's hope though.
> thrive well on the kinds of fertilizers readily available to farmers.
I just assumed (again) that all fertilisers were much the same, P, N, Ph etc with a few trace elements added so what kinds of fertilisers? or are you distinguishing that from what I'd call manures-types?
> It needs to grow well in orchards.
Some don't??
> It needs to be easy for pickers to pick.
Excellent point.
> It needs to grow fairly regular shapes and not look too ugly.
Sigh. Thank you, supermarkets, for this silliness.
Farms operate on very slim margins, so small changes can make a big difference. Some trees require more babying when they graft (including time to be ready for market), and some require more fertilizer (of the various types) than others (and perform poorly with too much).
Some apples do bruise more readily than others, and the red varieties tend to show the brusing less. That doesn't prevent some from being successful anyway; Granny Smiths are my favorite. But a small percent differential of loss can make the difference between a farmer's choice to grow that or not.
You could make a variety of apples breed true, but you have to selectively breed many individuals over many generations, and from seed to apple can be up to ten years, so it would have to be an enormous project to take on that you’d probably have to convince your grandchildren was worth pursuing.
The alternative is cloning by grafting on to root stock, which is so very much easier.
A lot of the food, especially fruit, that you eat are the same kind of clones. Bananas and avocados are a couple of examples.
A fun related fact is that there was this trend in the 50s and 60s of irradiating seeds or planting things in a circle around a radiation source hoping for useful mutations which could then be cloned and produced commercially. Atomic gardening actually produced several popular varieties of produce.
Apple trees are generally pollinated by a large number of other apple seedlings, so it may make sense to consider every individual plant grown from seed as a potential separate variety, so we generally don't do that as the vast majority of these random cross-breeds are bad.
Only experimental breeders would even consider apples from individual grown-from-seed plants, everyone else uses genetically identical clones grafted onto rootstock that's (AFAIK) also cloned.
Put another way, if you plant from seed, 99% of the resulting trees will produce terrible apples.
Shepard was planning to plant on the order of 500 trees and see if he gets anything. Any tree that struggles just gets culled, to keep the efforts cheap.
There are some uses for apple wood or roots and unpalatable apples that should at least let him break even.
I'm a bit skeptical that this will come to anything. Likely the journalist who heard the story doesn't know how common this is?
P.S. It's amusing to me that it's on front-page. Apple really works at HN ;)
Btw. only from appearance it looks like at cross between an apple and a quince (cydonia) ?
So how's it taste?
Or deliberately clickbaity title :)