“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, but most apple seeds don’t grow where they are dropped - they are carried away by birds or rodents and seed elsewhere. Also, most apples aren’t true to seed anyway - plants grown from seed don’t bear the same fruit
Temperate-zone seed fruit like apples and pears rarely look, taste, and feel like their genetic parents.
Temperate-zone stone fruit, on the other hand - think peaches, apricots, cherries, etc. - are quite different. You plant one of those seeds, and it will bear fruit that is (usually) indistinguishable from the parent tree that the seed came from.
Now, Apple and pear trees are grafted for both cloning of the fruiting section as well as good rootstock. But most stone fruit grafting has cloning only as a secondary consideration - they are grafted mostly to be joined onto well-proven, high-quality rootstock that can produce lots of sap and confer resistance to certain diseases.
Source: am orchardist.
And this is why there are, like, 431,663 different varieties of apples? Or is it all selective cultivation?
Honeycrisp is the state apple here, for which I’m grateful because it’s my favorite apple, so you can always get it. But I swear, when we go to the arboretum Apple House, the little market run by The Arb, there are bins of 20 different kinds of apples and it’s a different 20 every year. Find a new apple you like? Hah! Joke’s on you, you’ll never come across it again in the rest of your life.
Arkansas black is one of my favorites, because it dries/dehydrates so very, very well. It tastes like apple-flavored candy when you’re done with it.
I haven’t been able to find it aside from once, three years ago. :(
Apples are such great fruit. They might seem a little boring, but they keep well, and there are so many varieties. Almost the perfect fruit.
Wow, I always assumed all fruits and vegetables don’t grow exactly the same as the fruit/vegetable the seed came from.