Did you know that apples grown from seed do not reproduce the same variety?
The only way to reliably reproduce the same variety over and over is by grafting—taking a cutting from the original tree and splicing it onto an established rootstock—the cutting carries the genetic material for the individual variety. So in a very real sense, all commercial apple trees are directly traced to their original tree.
That’s also why there are so many varieties of apples—each time a tree grows from seed, it has the potential to develop into a completely new variety! Not all of them are worth saving, but some of our best-loved apples started out as chance seedlings discovered by some lucky homesteader.
