Tree of 40 Fruit | Hacker News Reader

Tree of 40 Fruit

epicurious.com

38 pointssytelus16 comments

You would think the single most important aspect of that article would be a nice picture showing the actual trees, either in bloom or fruiting but all I see is what looks like a photoshopped image at the top of that article.

Surprisingly the "artist" uses the same fake picture on their site as well. There are a few minor pictures of multi fruit grafted trees which you could find if you went to any garden center as they are quite common.

This seems like something destined to impress people who don't know any better. I'd love to see the actual 40 grafts tree in action but it seems to be agricultural vaporware.

Why you think its photoshoped? perhaps its too good to believe? He did TED talk with more photos of the tree. It would be very unlikely for him to not disclosed in venues like TED that these were photoshopped.

http://new.livestream.com/tedx/manhattan2014/videos/43864399

That image is clearly photoshopped. The image quality of the tree pixels vs the background, the strange lighting discrepancies and the shadow on bottom left of the planter box that is somehow towards the light.

Look at the transition at 29 seconds in that talk [1]. The clouds are in the same place.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9EuJ9QlikY#t=29

I don't hold anything against the artist though, the article just picked a terrible image to use.

I graft apple and pear trees in my back yard. One of my apple trees has 10+ varieties. The good thing is that once you have different varieties of apples on the same trees, the yield increases, because you have cross-pollinating varieties so proximately to each other. I learned how to do different grafts from various youtube videos.

There is also a group in SF that grafts edible grafts on decorative urban trees, such as on Japanese cherries: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/guerri...

Have you done any pear/apple combinations? Surprisingly (at least to me), there are some varieties of apple that are compatible with both pear and apple rootstock. Winter Banana (an apple, not a banana) and Bartlett Pear is one of combinations known to work. You can then use the Winter Banana graft as an interstem, to which you can graft apple varieties which are not directly compatible. Or you can go the other way, graft the Winter Banana on your apple tree, and then graft pears on to that. I've got a Winter Banana started in the back yard, but it's not yet large enough to start playing around with.

Nifty use of grafting, a surprisingly ancient agricultural technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting

So it turns out that plants swap genetic material when grafted. It would be really interesting to plant the seeds and see what the next generation looks like from each of the 40 branches. Could be a very intriguing genetics experiment. http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/05/01/unintent...

I don't think that you are interpreting the linked article correctly. The normal belief is that there is no gene transfer with grafting. The article claims that there can be limited gene transfer at the graft point, and that if you cut slices at this point and grow them out by tissue culture, you can propagate a true "graft hybrid", unlike the slightly more common "graft chimera". While the seeds resulting from the plant that grows from this in-vitro propagation might be interesting to study, the seeds from the fruit grafted on to the original tree are well understood to be remain true to the fruit (scion) and not the rootstock.

I would love to have one of these in my backyard. I find that a single fruit tree produces too many fruit and only lasts a short time of fruit-giving per year. But a free that gives 40 fruits spaced out is ideal.

So, can we call this a fruit salad tree?

It's kind of a fruit tree salad.

Isn't this putting all your eggs in one basket?

"Van Aken has grown 16 Trees of 40 Fruit so far, and they’ve been planted in museums, community centres, and private art collections around the US."

I think for a yard tree that is also serving an ornamental purpose, you are often doing that no matter what.

40 varieties of fruit sounds a lot nicer than 40 pounds of black walnuts (which have a thick, tough, stinking skin if you even think you want to harvest the nuts).

Blog spam: http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/chefsexperts/interv...

Thanks, changed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com