Post #73
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Apples and pears
16th December 2003, lunch time | Comments (11)
I found out the other day that the old apple tree at the bottom of our garden produces two different kinds of apple. How? Well apparently it’s not one tree, but two stuck together… what you do is:
- Cut off a little branch from Apple Tree ‘A’;
- Make a little cut in Apple Tree ‘B’;
- Stick the little branch in the little cut;
- Slap some goo in and tape it all up;
- Wait a while for the little branch to become a big branch and bud…
And there you have it, a tree that'll produce two kinds of apple. (You can even do it with apples and pears, or practically any kind of similar fruit.)
The process is called ‘grafting’, and can either be used to produce a single tree with two different fruit bearing sections (as in our case), or to combine a super root system from one tree with a super trunk, branch and fruit bearing system of another tree.
I didn’t realise how often, or how easily, this was done:
…an ancient skill with all kinds of modern applications. Almost any fruit tree you buy in the nursery has been grafted with a disease-resistant rootstock to produce a hardier tree … if you can’t decide which apple or peach to graft, you can graft several different varieties onto the same tree.
Most fruit trees and decorative trees you buy from a nursery are grafted. How else could the nursery be sure you were getting a young tree with the characteristics you were promised?
Grafting, like cloning, ensures that the new tree is exactly like the parent tree … the only way to guarantee that any apple tree will propagate true to the parent.
… all MacIntosh trees presently grown have been vegetatively reproduced from the original MacIntosh discovered in 1729 in Dunelda, Ontario. This guarantees that all MacIntosh fruit today is the same as it was in 1729.
There’s a remarkably thorough explanation of the whole process on the University of Minnesota’s Extension Service web site.
I also thought that you could easily grow fruit trees from pips, but apparently that’s not even true:
Gardeners know that planting the seeds of a peach or apple will not culminate in a tree that has the same delicious fruit. Instead, the seeds produce wild progeny, usually with only marginally edible fruit. To get the fruit you crave, grafting is the answer.
I’m amazed I never knew this.
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— George W Bush (9)- What WordPress is doing to combat comment spam. (1)
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