Grafting!

[errantember]

I'm currently reading The Grafter's Handbook, a very in-depth tome about grafting plants. I'm mainly interested because I don't have very much sunlight in my yard, so I'm limited in the number of fruit trees I can plant. I have this one tree that's a non-fruiting plum or pear or something, and it would be *ideal* rootstock to graft fruiting tree limbs onto. There are certain compatibility limits, but nurseries are selling what's called Fruit Salad trees, with sometimes as much as 5 different varieties of fruit on a single tree. So the next goal is to find out exactly what *kind* of tree it is, and see what I can add. If the answer is "nothing", then it's Happy Chainsaw Time!

I also finished The Botany of Desire and earlier work by Michael Pollan of the deservedly popular The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Pollan's work has been largely responsible for my own personal transformation away from industrialized agriculture toward local food. We learn in BOD that apple trees never breed true. If you take a handful of apple seeds, even from the same apple, and plant them all, every tree that comes out will be completely different. Every one of the metric buttloads of different kinds of apples we eat are clones of one particular tree that started that variety. Every single Fuji you eat comes from a genetically identical tree. The apple groves created on the frontier by Johnny Appleseed were valuable mainly for making cider, which was automatically safe to drink because the alcohol kills things. In some cases people drank more cider than water. Each grove was a total potluck of crazy variety, and the occurrence of a tree that actually produced sweet-tasting apples was a very rare and special event. And even if you took seeds from that tree, they would still come out completely differently both from each other and from their parent.

Comments

[darthbecca.livejournal.com]

Frankenfruit

[worldmegan.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Michael Pollan pretty much had the same effect on me, but I didn't know this about apples. It's really interesting. (And I typically eat a lot of apples!) The genetically identical bit is unnerving.

Well...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

...it's not like cloning apples is new. It's been around for thousands of years, and doesn't involve any gene modification or anything. Just lots of cutting and grafting.

Re: Well...

[worldmegan.livejournal.com]

Well yeah -- but if you know that apples don't do that naturally, doesn't it kind of make you really interested in experiencing apples the way they're supposed to be?

I am constantly fascinated by the weird shit we do to the world around us, when the world around us does such neat THINGS.

I'm not AGAINST it (well, not all of it), but... it's bizarre.

Re: Well...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

Most apples the way they occur naturally are nearly inedible. On the other hand, all those cloned apples are just about equally vulnerable to a disease like that that caused the potato famine. I say nearly, because they may not all be grafted onto the same rootstock, and the rootstock can evidently confer some degree of immunity to certain kinds of disease.

Huh.

[oracle-tx.livejournal.com]

That's interesting about the apples, the Fruit Salad tree sounds like a cool thing to have for a small yard. I guess if George Washington chopped down his father's favorite apple tree, he would have caught hell for it. :P