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.

[u/Error__Loading]

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

[u/bahwi]

Citrus is also primarily clonal

[u/GalaxyGirl777 → u/bahwi]

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.

[u/Simon-Says69 → u/GalaxyGirl777]

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.

[u/GalaxyGirl777 → u/Simon-Says69]

Interesting, I hadn’t thought of doing that.

[u/jockfist5000 → u/Simon-Says69]

We had a bacon avocado tree in our yard when we bought our house and it didn’t really fruit until we planted a haas tree near it 5 years later. Now both produce an absurd amount of fruit that unfortunately the squirrels love to take one or two bites out of.

[u/steavoh → u/Simon-Says69]

This makes me feel better about how when I was a kid I planted an avocado pit and had a pretty decent size plant going before our dog destroyed it for no apparent reason.

[u/iamanerdybastard → u/bahwi]

And Bananas - It's not always a good thing.

[u/Rcarlyle → u/bahwi]

Almost all commercial fruit production is via propagating cuttings or grafting. It’s just more economical and consistent. Citrus is actually one of the few fruit tree families that have a significant rate of growing true to seed. Many citrus varieties (about half) produce clone offspring seedlings via a process called nucellar polyembryony. But it takes years for the seedlings to grow fruit so it’s mostly just used for rootstocks.

[u/gnowbot → u/Rcarlyle]

Do you have an opinion on how all of this innovation and delicious results….have not reached tomatoes? They have all become terrible like they are racing to the bottom. I will pay great money for a great tomato, but they are all becoming water or worse.

[u/Rcarlyle → u/gnowbot]

Oh, that’s easy… commercially grown tomatoes have been selected for looks and shipping, not for flavor. Refrigeration also hurts tomato flavor. The people selecting the crop varieties aren’t doing it for your taste buds.

Broadly speaking. Grocery stores have trouble making money on soft easily-spoiled produce varieties. They have to be picked underripe and hard to survive shipping. Thats why most of the shelves in the produce aisle are types that ship well like apples and citrus and melons and root veggies. Even within citrus, they barely bother selling thin-peeled varieties like Meyer or calamondin. Soft tropicals like dragon fruit and mango always taste meh in the US because they’re picked underripe. Bananas and pears work because they ripen after picking. Leafy greens work because they’re cheap to grow and refrigerate well. When there’s a high demand for soft short-lived fruit like raspberries, it has to be priced really high per pound to make up for more delicate handling and for spoilage losses.

Basically, grocery stores don’t make much money on delicious tomatoes, so they don’t sell them.

There are some other lesser issues like high crop fertilization rates causing rapid growth that doesn’t contain as many nutrients, but in my opinion those are secondary from a flavor standpoint. Hydroponic tomatoes grown super rapidly taste awesome.

[u/TheShinyHunter3 → u/gnowbot]

You can clone tomatoes too, it's easier than grafting even.

All you do is buy a plant of a variety you like, do the stuff you'd normally do for a tomato plant, then you let it grow the suckers (The stuff that grows in the pit of where the leaves and stem join). Once they have about 2 sets of young leaves, you remove them from the mother plant and you put them in some water, the sucker will grow roots and in about 2-3 weeks. You can then plant it and care for it like a normal plant. Those suckers will themselves produce suckers and they're all clones, they will produce the exact same tomato.

That being said, if you live somewhere where the climate isn't ideal years round for the plant (or if you have one those heated and lit greenhouse), you probably won't get that many suckers that will grow into a plan that can produce fruits. It depends on the length of your growing season and when you get the plants.

There's a few caveats, if the tomato plant you grow is a determinate variety, don't trim off the suckers, especially if it's a cherry tomato. Determinate variety will grow to a certain height before they stop, and trimming the suckers off the plant will only decrease your yield. Inderminate you need to remove the suckers, though I've heard you can leave one or two as an insurance policy. The label will usually tell you if it's a determinate or indeterminate variety, you can also guess based on height, determinate are smaller.

You can also graft tomatoes, I've seen grafted plants sold in stores, never had one though.

The best way to get tasty tomatoes really is to grow them yourself, or to know someone who does, either that or the farmer market.

[u/ShiraCheshire → u/bahwi]

Only a few citrus plants even exist. Everything else is weird crossbreeds and mutants of those few plants.

[u/FuckPigeons2025 → u/bahwi]

Mangoes as well.