For those who don’t know, apples are almost universally grown by graft now. Due to some weird genetics, if you plant a honeycrisp Apple, you will not get a honey crisp tree! Even if you pollinated a honeycrisp flower with honeycrisp pollen you’ll get a more or less random apple. Trees are propagated by taking a cutting from an established tree and growing that into a full tree.
That means in a field of Jongolds or Muzus, every tree is a clone of the original tree!
So research orchards will grow thousands of trees just to find a few good ones.
This means that every wild apple tree you see is more or less unique, and most of them make apples that are super bitter and nasty.
But sometimes you’d get a good tree! So before apples could be easily transported (the ‘red delicious’ was popularized because it didn’t bruise easily and lasted longest in railcars) different areas would have their own completely unique variety of apple. I assume these are the ones he’s taking cuttings of!
Johnny Appleseed went around planting apple trees by seed so that people could claim the land as a farm, and so they’d have apples to make cider and applejack (bassically apple whiskey brandy).
ReverseFlash_94 on November 8th, 2021 at 13:37 UTC »
I guess he really doesn’t like doctors.
justabill71 on November 8th, 2021 at 13:38 UTC »
How do you like them apples?
pjk922 on November 8th, 2021 at 13:58 UTC »
For those who don’t know, apples are almost universally grown by graft now. Due to some weird genetics, if you plant a honeycrisp Apple, you will not get a honey crisp tree! Even if you pollinated a honeycrisp flower with honeycrisp pollen you’ll get a more or less random apple. Trees are propagated by taking a cutting from an established tree and growing that into a full tree.
That means in a field of Jongolds or Muzus, every tree is a clone of the original tree!
So research orchards will grow thousands of trees just to find a few good ones.
This means that every wild apple tree you see is more or less unique, and most of them make apples that are super bitter and nasty.
But sometimes you’d get a good tree! So before apples could be easily transported (the ‘red delicious’ was popularized because it didn’t bruise easily and lasted longest in railcars) different areas would have their own completely unique variety of apple. I assume these are the ones he’s taking cuttings of!
Johnny Appleseed went around planting apple trees by seed so that people could claim the land as a farm, and so they’d have apples to make cider and applejack (bassically apple whiskey brandy).