So much diversity!

Fall is coming to a close, and with it the end of another gardening season. The storeroom is filled with acorn and butternut squashes, onions are collected and potatoes are all dug up. For those of you lucky enough to have a greenhouse or low tunnels the season is still going, but for the rest of us it's time to clean, compost, prepare and wait til next year's gardening begins.

I'll be spending the winter months talking about a slew of topics from varieties in my test garden to insects. The first topic I want to talk about is diversity, and the amazing variation that is available to gardeners.

Apples (bottom) and grapes (top) from around the world in different size, shapes, colors and textures.

This past September I had the opportunity to drive to the USDA ARS germplasm center in Geneva, New York with my good friend Joseph Tychonievich. For those of you who don't know what a germplasm center is, it is a facility dedicated to the maintenance and preservation of genetically diverse plant material. Before commercialization of fruits and vegetables, people selected plants for flavor, texture, color and winter storage, not for traveling, uniform ripeness and some of these other traits that current varieties of fruits and vegetables have to meet. There were hundreds of varieties of melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli, etc. Germplasm centers are facilities that maintain the "heirloom" varieties, but they also have wild and unadapted relatives that might not be tasty, but are good sources to breed in disease resistance and other traits. The United States Department of Ag has a number of germplasm centers across the U.S. The center in New York contains apples, grapes, tart cherries as well as some vegetables like tomatoes. In their apple catalog alone there are 100s of cultivars of apples from all over the world as well as wild species from Kazakhstan.

A young apple forest at the germplasm center. You can see the ground is littered with hundreds of fallen apples. Each tree in this block is from a single seed and is therefore genetically diverse from all the other trees around it.

Apples (Malus spp.) originated in Kazakhstan, and in some parts of that country old apple forests still remain. It is from these forests that apples were brought to the rest of the world and selected until they became the apples varieties that we have now. I had two goals when I visited the germplasm center:  1) Try as many apples as I could and 2) Bring back seeds to plant my own apple forest. 

This apple species had beautiful color, the flesh was an orangish red once you cut it open. The taste was a little too bitter for my taste, but it was one lovely apple!

These are all wild species apples from Kazakhstan. The one on the far left is about the size of a Golden Delicious. This was just a sampling from a couple of the trees that were there.

Even the flesh color of these apples had diversity!

Some of the varieties we tasted were amazingly delicious! Others... let's just say they were reminiscent of old gym sock. We tried fruit from related species, that was so bitter and astringent it made your tongue numb. The textures of the fruit were incredible too, with some being mushy and grainy while others were crisp and light. The diversity in apples is amazing. I had no idea that so many varieties existed. There was even one apple variety that tasted almost "meaty" to me.

While I did bring back a lot of seeds, none of these will be the exact same as the apples from which I took them. Some plants are self-pollinated and their seeds will be just like the parent plants, others are only cross-pollinated. Apples are cross-pollinated and each seed is distinct and unique having some combination of genes from its parents. All apple varieties are maintained through cuttings called scions that are grafted onto rootstocks.

Breeding a new delicious apple variety takes a bit of luck and a lot of patience. While none of the apple seeds I planted might end up being the next Honeycrisp, they are a treasure trove of diversity and I'm excited to see what will grow.

This apple seedling came from a Gala I bought at the grocery store. You don't have to go to New York to find apple diversity, it is right in your local supermarket. Remember, apples are cross-pollinated so each seed is unique.