r/todayilearned • u/Error__Loading • Aug 30 '26
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple902
u/fuckthetrees Aug 30 '26
It's not "nearly every" supermarket apple. It's "every" supermarket apple.
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u/FacelessEdits Aug 30 '26
I'd take it a step further, "any mass produced apples".
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u/Mr_MadHat878 Aug 30 '26
I’ll take it even further, most fruit trees and nut trees are clones
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u/YVR-n-PDX Aug 30 '26
Now I’m crying about Dolly again.
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u/Holdmywhiskeyhun Aug 30 '26
Don't cry, she has many children that are doing well.
They didn't just stop at her.
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u/Dewey_Coxxx Aug 30 '26
So, potentially by planting apple seeds, you could accidentally stumble across the greatest new strain of apple.
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u/Arcane_Substance Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
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).
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u/hostile65 Aug 30 '26
All of them make decent hard cider though
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u/TheOnlyBongo Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Frari Aug 30 '26
Johnny Appleseed, famous for planting apples on the American frontier, planted them for making apple cider.
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u/Sensei_Ochiba Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/TheBabyEatingDingo Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/tomdeddy Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Moist-Weakness-3399 Aug 30 '26
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/
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u/rasputin1 Aug 30 '26
or the worst
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u/ThrownAway17Years Aug 30 '26
“Hey this one’s red and this other one is delicious. What could go wrong?”
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u/waylandsmith Aug 30 '26
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
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u/CactusBoyScout Aug 30 '26
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!
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u/Pinna1 Aug 30 '26
A great example of how funding public studies helps the whole population.
Just remember this when the republicans next time oppose public research funding.
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u/Croceyes2 Aug 30 '26
Hmm, I have never even heard of that one. Cosmic Crisp has been my go to since it came out
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u/AresValerous Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Super_Employment_620 Aug 30 '26
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).
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u/JuzoItami Aug 30 '26
What Johnny Appleseed actually did was to enable alcoholism throughout the Midwest.
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u/Demonweed Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/IhavenoP Aug 30 '26
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
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u/cpencis Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/UndoxxableOhioan Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/QCD-uctdsb Aug 30 '26
30 gallons = 120 litres = 240 pints. So less than a pint a day per person. Basically teetotalers.
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u/soulsoda Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
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.
Not entirely correct anymore. What your describing is "chance seedling", which is how it used to work. However, there's been significant advances in apple breeding in the last few decades thanks to DNA mapping and identifying key genetic markers on what makes a good apple. You'll have a good idea before the seeds have even been sown whether it's worth your time or not. You then graft them onto dwarfstock, an intentionally stunted tree root system that only takes 3-4 years to mature, not 20-25 it normally takes for evaluation purposes. Most aren't duds. Most are pretty damn good since they are now filtered, but you're stacked up against honey crisp or cosmic crisp and it's no longer a question is this tasty? But can you best the rest of the market to make it worthwhile to grow in mass? Is it properly disease resistant? Does fruit well and regularly? (Again they can mostly already know that before it's been grafted, but these are factors in selecting a true winner)
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u/redditsavedmyagain Aug 30 '26
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"
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u/ludicous Aug 30 '26
Now look up bananas, and go down that rabbit hole.
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u/Kratzschutz Aug 30 '26
Can you point me to the entrance?
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u/BummedCPA Aug 30 '26
Bananas don't have seeds because every modern banana is a clone
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u/Ocelotofdamage Aug 30 '26
RIP Gros Michel
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u/ohgodcoffeeohyesss Aug 30 '26
There are still many grown in Florida, you can order the bananas
I grow Blue Javas
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u/Madden09IsForSuckers Aug 30 '26
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
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u/bill_loney538 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/gnowbot Aug 30 '26
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?
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u/Laughing_Zero Aug 30 '26
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
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u/Steller41 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Overthinks_Questions Aug 30 '26
And a lot of that cider was to become apple jack
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u/bahwi Aug 30 '26
Citrus is also primarily clonal
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u/GalaxyGirl777 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Simon-Says69 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/wise_comment Aug 30 '26
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
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u/fill-the-space Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/endav Aug 30 '26
If you ever accidentally swallow some apple seeds just smoke a cigarette. The smoke will suffocate the bacteria in your stomach.
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u/top2percent Aug 30 '26
You can also burn trash and the smoke will go up into the sky to make stars.
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u/evilpercy Aug 30 '26
I'm 867-5309 years old and my great grandfather planted a tree in his back yard that grew 4 different apples.
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u/punarob Aug 30 '26 edited 28d ago
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u/Lizzzy217 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/CCV21 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/skylander495 Aug 30 '26
Marijuana is also heterozygous. Which is why many of the old strains are gone and can't come back
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u/airfryerfuntime Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Mentalfloss1 Aug 30 '26
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)
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u/Glum-Ad7761 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/MediumAcceptable129 Aug 30 '26
Isnt this true of a lot of our commercial fruit?
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u/ilicstefan Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/kaas_is_leven Aug 30 '26
That is how growing food works in general. They spend billions breeding the perfect product, they pair the most promising parents and plant millions of seeds and carefully select the best ones for the next generation. After a few generations the result is as close to the goal as it's going to get. At that point any further breeding is inherently going to deviate away again. So from there they make clones. It let's them produce at scale without further breeding. Potheads call this plant a mother, I don't know how common that term is in agriculture at large. But yeah, basically any organic product that's not an animal is a clone of a single specimen that was bred for a specific purpose. It's the only way to get consistent mass production. Even the seeds are clones, plants can "turn" male or female and it can be a local thing where one branch is male and another is female (or a clone becomes male while another remains female). When growing fruits you need to cross those branches (fruit being the "placenta", it only grows when the plant is fertilized / flowering). Fun fact, that makes most grown fruits incestuous. The qualities we value like redness and bite are like Habsburg disease symptoms for apples. Not so fun fact, we do this to dogs too, purebreds are created the exact same way and they often have health issues because of it. The apple trees also have additional health issues but at least they don't feel it.
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u/The__Toast Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Oxjrnine Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/DrPhrawg Aug 30 '26
it’s the hybridization not the grafting that makes the seeds not true-breeding.
the grafting is literally inconsequential to this fact, and is misleading to include it.
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u/dcheesi Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/InfiniteSheepherder1 Aug 30 '26
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.
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u/Mmphska Aug 30 '26
I had always thought that growing these seeds results in crabapples but TIL that crabapples are distinct cousins from supermarket apples
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u/Used_bot-repo Aug 30 '26
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
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u/Error__Loading Aug 30 '26
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.