You can’t take the seed of a tasty apple, plant it and expect the tree to have similarly tasting apples. If you want to duplicate a tree, you need to take a twig and graft it on top of an existing tree.
Take a small branch of a tree you like, splice it using a technique, take a small young tree of same type but different variety, splice it, attach branch of variety you like, seal. Nurture it, and the branch uses the donor tree to pull up nutrients and water, and the branch then grows into a whole new tree. It’s cloning, but grafting helps it move faster and without as much risk.
There are plenty of fruit trees around towns here(eastern Europe).
And they do produce fruit.
Pollution around major roads and things like dumpsters are a problem, but the trees are perfectly capable of producing tasty fruit.
You can’t take the seed of a tasty apple, plant it and expect the tree to have similarly tasting apples. If you want to duplicate a tree, you need to take a twig and graft it on top of an existing tree.
Source: MinuteEarth on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIajCqcvTg8)
[Edit: Previously, before I remembered that this video exists, I couldn’t remember the correct word for “grafting”. Hence Sidyctism II.’s response.
I love that grafting is real and it works. It always seems like straight scifi to me.
The real marvels are the ones where they graft apples, oranges, etc together. Expensive as hell and they don’t survive as long though.
Grafting?
Take a small branch of a tree you like, splice it using a technique, take a small young tree of same type but different variety, splice it, attach branch of variety you like, seal. Nurture it, and the branch uses the donor tree to pull up nutrients and water, and the branch then grows into a whole new tree. It’s cloning, but grafting helps it move faster and without as much risk.
They were responding to the original version of my comment where I asked what the technique was called.
When grafting, do you need to remove any of the original branches? Or will the tree grow two different types of apples? Or some kind of hybrid?
Any branches you don’t remove will still be the original tree. You can have a single tree that yields multiple varieties of apples.
Costco was selling fruit trees with multiple different fruits in it a few years ago. One cherry tree has 4 different cherries in it.
If I had a hard i would have bought one and put it in my yard
Well, you can just buy apple trees from a nursery, it’s what farmers do.
Yes but that’s because the nursery has already grafted the branches of a known-to-be-tasty cultivar onto that tree before putting it up for sale.
Yeah, I’d just rather pay someone who knows what they’re doing for it rather than fuck it up over and over again on my own
They’re also soil, water and other conditions. Doubt a tree planted on a city is going to have the nutrients to give you tasty fruits
There are plenty of fruit trees around towns here(eastern Europe).
And they do produce fruit. Pollution around major roads and things like dumpsters are a problem, but the trees are perfectly capable of producing tasty fruit.
Enter Andernach – the edible town
https://www.andernach.de/stadt/essbare-stadt/