Heirloom and not seeds...[gardening]

[Externet]

Hi.

Say we eat a  delicious cherry, a watermelon, a tomato, a peach, or pear and keep the seeds after consumption.  Heard often that sowing those seeds may yield a cultivar, version, or species different from the seed originator just enjoyed, and to ensure proper fruit harvesting, grafts are necessary.

How did nature produced peaches, cherries... for millions of years, and now grafting propagation is needed if we want them to grow in our backyard ?  Can someone explain ?

 

[iNow]

They don’t sell us wild variations in the store. The ones we buy have been cultivated and selected by farmers for specific traits for generations, and that often changes how they reproduce. 

[Externet]

Thanks.  Let me attempt to translate... What we get from a store is not heirloom, nature, wild; it is a selected, modified, altered vegetable that has the 'property' of yielding random results when their seeds are planted because  ¿?  

And that is what farmers sow and supermarkets sell because they yield more commercially preferred successful, bigger, prettier, juicier, moneymaking, flavorful, abundant... produce.

And this grafting does not apply to a carrot,  yam, lettuce... instead other modification methods are used then that end with the same unpredictable yield if their seeds are sowed. 😶

Then, if I want artichokes in my back yard, the seeds should be heirloom if the plan is to use their own seeds next planting ?   Currently, my artichoke plants are behaving very different than the last year crop... were planted this year from last year harvested seeds.

[CharonY]

41 minutes ago, Externet said:

What we get from a store is not heirloom, nature, wild; it is a selected, modified, altered vegetable that has the 'property' of yielding random results when their seeds are planted because 

They do not utterly random of course, but since they are hybrids they are not necessarily stable, either. I.e. pollen from one plant is taken and transferred to a different plant. The resulting seeds can either have both genotypes (i.e. duplicating their genome) or have some other mix of their parents (plants are less fuzzy about retaining genome integrity than animals).

Heirloom seeds AFAIK do not have strict definition, but typically are from established line which could have started as hybrid, from what I understand.

[Strange]

1 hour ago, Externet said:

Hi.

Say we eat a  delicious cherry, a watermelon, a tomato, a peach, or pear and keep the seeds after consumption.  Heard often that sowing those seeds may yield a cultivar, version, or species different from the seed originator just enjoyed, and to ensure proper fruit harvesting, grafts are necessary.

How did nature produced peaches, cherries... for millions of years, and now grafting propagation is needed if we want them to grow in our backyard ?  Can someone explain ?

I think there are a few different things going on here.

One is that if you plant the sends from, say, a cherry you bought in the shop then that is probably going to grow 'true"; i.e. produce a plant that is similar to the parent, with similar fruit. The exception could be if the bees cross-pollinated it with a wild-cherry or some other compatible variant. Then you might get something rather different.

But some fruit just don't work that way. (I have no idea why.) So if you plant seeds from a delicious variety of apple, you might get something completely different. (I mean, it will still be an apple, but possibly nothing like the cultivar you just ate.) So, successful apple varieties are propagated by cloning (e.g. from cuttings).

And then grafting a particular variety or species onto a different rootstock can change the characteristics. Mainly, I think, in terms of how hardy they are, or how large they grow. I don't think it will significantly change the fruit. Except as side effect of the plants ability to thrive.

(I know see that CharonY has posted. I might regret this relatively uninformed post!)

[StringJunky]

In commercial cereals,wheat, barley etc. You have:

B1 - This is the purest strain of seed, which is bred from the original parents. This is used to make C1, which is what farmers buy to make seed that can produce more seed, which will be C2. When C2 is planted, this makes C3,  C3 is the end of the line and consumed. Planting C3 will result in too many variations and not true to the original design.

Edited June 19, 2020 by StringJunky