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Question of the Week / QotW - 09.12.06 - How do farmers propagate seedless crops?
« on: 07/12/2009 15:06:25 »
Hi,
Regarding the reproductive abilities of seedless fruits:
Many commercial fruit plants can be reproduced readily by cloning. In fact for some kind of fruits that is the norm whether the fruits have seeds or not.
If you planted seeds from your favorite variety of apple, for example, the resulting trees wouldn't produce the same apples again, but instead they'd each produce their own unique apples. Kind of like your kids may remind people of you, while not really being that much like you.
Usually these unique apple trees are not helpful commercially because the growers want to sell recogizeable names of apples that are currently popular or famous, and do so in bulk.. So what the growers do is they graft cuttings from the parent plant onto bare root stock and let them grow into clone copies of the parent tree. For any given variety you might see at the market, all the thousands of apple trees that produce those apples all got cloned from one original tree (or from later clones of that one original tree). What happened to that one original tree's seeds are pretty much irrelevant! Same with the seeds of the clones.
I'm sure there are other ways to do it too, that would work better on other kinds of fruit plants. For example I have read that some of the annuals that are seedless are hybrids and so the seeds to plant more are obtained by crossing 2 other varities. But on the apple farm, grafting is how it's done!
Hope this helps,
--Kaas Baichtal
Bayfield Apple Co
http://www.bayfieldapple.com/
Regarding the reproductive abilities of seedless fruits:
Many commercial fruit plants can be reproduced readily by cloning. In fact for some kind of fruits that is the norm whether the fruits have seeds or not.
If you planted seeds from your favorite variety of apple, for example, the resulting trees wouldn't produce the same apples again, but instead they'd each produce their own unique apples. Kind of like your kids may remind people of you, while not really being that much like you.
Usually these unique apple trees are not helpful commercially because the growers want to sell recogizeable names of apples that are currently popular or famous, and do so in bulk.. So what the growers do is they graft cuttings from the parent plant onto bare root stock and let them grow into clone copies of the parent tree. For any given variety you might see at the market, all the thousands of apple trees that produce those apples all got cloned from one original tree (or from later clones of that one original tree). What happened to that one original tree's seeds are pretty much irrelevant! Same with the seeds of the clones.
I'm sure there are other ways to do it too, that would work better on other kinds of fruit plants. For example I have read that some of the annuals that are seedless are hybrids and so the seeds to plant more are obtained by crossing 2 other varities. But on the apple farm, grafting is how it's done!
Hope this helps,
--Kaas Baichtal
Bayfield Apple Co
http://www.bayfieldapple.com/