Why Apples Need A New Johnny Appleseed

Every year, the US grows more than 10 billion pounds of apples. What are the best sellers?

1. Gala

2. Red Delicious

3. Fuji

4. Honeycrisp

5. Granny Smith

6. McIntosh

7. Golden Delicious

8. Pink Lady

9. Rome

10. Empire

On this week’s deep-dive, we talk about:

Why Apples Need A New Johnny Appleseed

When I was three or four years old, I fitfully walked into my first semester of prekindergarten.

With one hand on my yellow backpack and the other squeezed into my mom’s, I stared into the abyss of the classroom’s front door.

Behind it was the ‘new world’ of education. Like the first voyages into the Americas with Cortes, my mom (sweetly) pushed me along with a “burn the boats” mentality. I was the sailor with a good life at home, quietly saying, “are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Fortunately, I entered the classroom to find a saintly woman who would probably make the list of all-time teachers.

In those first few weeks, she introduced me to a new explorer — a pioneer in American folklore who replaced my uncertainty with curiosity: Johnny Appleseed.

We learned about the history of apples and the powerful magic trapped in seeds. To prove this magic, my teacher gave out seeds (cheerios) that she guaranteed would sprout overnight. When I returned the next morning to find donuts growing off of a tree, I was hooked.

I’m sure many of you had similar experiences learning about the legend of Johnny Appleseed.

If you didn’t know already, the legend is real. Johnny Appleseed floated down rivers in the 1800s with a different name: John Chapman.

We owe many of the commercial varieties in our grocery stores today to the seeds carried by Chapman — Golden Delicious being the most notable.

But our modern apple stock sits on a precarious foundation. Like our global supply of Cavendish bananas that are projected to disappear in a decade, apples almost completely rely on clones that can be wiped out by a single aggressive disease.

The Dangers of Relying On Apple Clones

An apple tree’s greatest strength is also one of its greatest weaknesses.

Unlike many other types of fruit, an apple doesn’t grow true to seed.

What does that mean?

If I gave you the most delicious apple the world has ever tasted and you tried to replicate it by planting a seed, you’d end up with a totally different type of apple. It might be amazing, but it could also be inedible.

Every flower on an apple tree might be pollinated by a different bee from a different tree. As a result, every fruit will have different genetics and turn into a different variety.

That’s good for the tree’s ability to survive diseases. It’s bad for people who want to grow the same type of apple across their entire orchard.

That’s why when the roman empire got its hands on apples from the Middle East, it opted for uniformity by growing trees from cuttings instead of seeds. Every grafted tree has the same genetics as its parent, so apples stopped evolving at the same rate.

The practice became the global standard until a tiny number of varieties produced nearly all of the fruit.

When colonists moved to America and needed fruit trees to secure land ownership, the grafted European varieties couldn’t survive the new climate.

The new world needed new apples, and John Chapman filled the demand.

His job wasn’t easy. Chapman couldn’t use cuttings. His affiliations with the Swedenborgian Church prohibited grafting, so seeds were the only answer as he created nurseries on the western frontier.

Inadvertently, the boats filled with hundreds of thousands of seeds kickstarted the apple’s evolution. Out of that genetic lottery, Chapman discovered several gems that carry on production today.

But the apple’s good times wouldn’t last. Like the roman empire, predictability has once again narrowed production down to a tiny fraction of varieties that produce most of our fruit.

Becoming The New Appleseed

Apples need new genetic diversity, and it’s trapped inside every seed in every apple you eat from the store.

When I was in grad school in Minnesota, I learned about the school’s pride in creating the newest apple gem, the Honeycrisp.

You might think you need a complicated lab and knowledge about cultivating fruit to create a new apple variety. But you don’t.

You could be a kid in pre-K or an office worker with a voracious appetite for apples and a fridge at home.

Anytime you eat an apple, save the seeds in the fridge for a few months before putting them in your backyard.

Who knows, you might grow a new apple variety that you can name after yourself like my friend James.

See you next week, fellow earthlings.

— Permacultured

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