2022-11-10T08:00:00Z
Does anyone have any thoughts about landrace breeding fruit trees? Joseph touched on it briefly in his book, but mostly all it said was, “Plant some seeds.” Good idea, and I’m wondering if anyone has any more thoughts about it!
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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Nonspecific woody perennial landrace discussion
I was very excited by the Lucy Glo apples on sale at my supermarket, to add them to my collection of apple seeds. they’re Airlie Red Flesh x Honeycrisp so may actually be hardy here. And I am still going to plant some, BUT…
…I heard a rumour that commercial apples (not little farmer’s market operations, but maybe grocery-store-sized ones?) can have trees that have bad/undesirable fruit used as pollinators, because they’re more effective at pollinating? Has anyone heard of that?
Lauren wrote about it another post (commercial orchards have rows of crabapples?)… I haven’t found that one yet but will add when I do.
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In my area we have a few wild or rather I suppose feral fruit trees that I think could be considered local landraces. None are really common, but peaches are the most so followed by pears then apples.
They all make just make small fruits, but the pears and peaches are absolutely delicious. I’ve only seen one apparently wild apple tree in my life that had good tasting apples and only four or five total. Maybe it was a crabapple of sorts as the apples were only about the size of a golf ball. It was in the pasture on my grandparent’s farm.
I have peaches and pears grown from seeds off the wild trees and they seem to have bred true to the ones they came from although I haven’t gotten many pears yet as they are quite large trees and take years to start blooming.
The peaches are rather dwarfish and start fruiting in just three or four years. I’m still hoping they will cross with the nursey bought trees, but they bloom much earlier so don’t know if that will ever happen. Sometimes they bloom while it is still frosting and freezing, and it doesn’t seem to hurt them but there aren’t any bees out to pollinate them so few peaches those years.
I’ve haven’t messed with the apples because they are so nasty except for that one and that was decades ago, I doubt it’s still there and I don’t know who owns that land now or if I could even remember exactly where it was. I have some trees from volunteer trees found near old orchards or yard trees but they I’m sure have not gone through multiple generations of natural adaptations like the more isolated ones. I’m still waiting from them to bloom.
Overall, I’m skeptical of purposely landracing trees because of the multi-year wait between generations.
I recently watched a Skillcult video on YouTube, in which he was excitedly talking about how he’d bred exactly the apple he was looking for, in only one generation. I thought, “Oooh!”
It took nine years for that one tree to start bearing fruit. And he planted seventy of that cross in order to find that one ideal tree. The amount of land and patience that must have taken are huge.
Clearly “one generation” is not a trivial amount of time with fruit trees.
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I might sill argue that isn’t technically landrace but no need to pick the nits. That guy is doing some great work, I hope he gets the support he needs to keep it up!
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I dont think landrace really applies to fruiting trees, mostly because it’s just unnecessary. Fruiting trees are genetically diverse because it would just take so long to stable one variety and there is no point when you can just take cuttings when you find something you like. In breeding you could use landrace principle of letting diverse population to mix, but any meaningfull grow out would need quite some space. Really depends if you want to breed or just grow. Just having mix of different varieties would give you a healthy population of genetically diverse plants.
Oh, I love the idea of actual localized landrace fruit trees. Able to grow wild, on their own roots, reproducing relatively true to type, tolerant of resident bugs and diseases. I have those already sort of in those I’ve collected over the years but and this is just my guess they did it completely on their own when very early homesteaders planted them and then eventually abandoned the place.
I suspicion based on where I have found them that they are descended from some that were planted before the government got around to granting ownership of the land to revolutionary war veterans a little over 200 years ago. I think that maybe who ever originally planted them had to leave along with the Indians when the official owners arrived.
Still my attempts to cross them with more modern larger fruited varieties haven’t panned out. Or if so, haven’t had time to become obvious. And I’m completely out of room. The only way to plant more is if something shows itself deserving of being culled to make room.
I think I might have a shot of seeing some new kinds of grapes in next few years but trees, not so much.
I am mega-interested in locally-adapted landraces of fruit and nut trees. My growing philosophy looks forward ten-thousand years. That’s hundreds of generations even for trees that take decades to mature and bear fruit. When I say that landrace gardening is best done as a community, I mean it whole-hardheartedly. The community now living, and those communities that won’t be born for hundreds of years.
I work on landrace breeding projects that span lifetimes, even centuries. The last couple of years, I have been planting hundreds of walnut seeds for the 4th generation of a walnut breeding project that my family started before I was born.
Every summer, I eat fruits from apple and plum landraces that were started by my family and community 162 years ago. I am growing the next generation of those trees. They are essentially immune to the local insects and diseases.
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@Joseph_Lofthouse do you have squirrels in your neighborhood? In last ten years or so they have helped me plant thousands of walnuts, hickory nuts and pecans. At first, I was distraught, when they broke into my stash, thinking they would steal and eat them all.
When they started coming up all over the place, I realized that they DO NOT find again and eat all that they bury. Give the neighborhood squirrels a five-gallon bucket of pecans and in a couple years baby pecan trees are everywhere. Sure, they eat some, maybe a lot but they deserve a little reward for all their efforts. I don’t think pecan is actually native here, but they grow faster and produce far better than the hickory or walnut.
There are a lot of old pecan trees in the little towns by the river, sometimes you can use a push broom and snow shovel to collect them from the sidewalks and parking lots. One time I had the bed of my truck a foot deep with them. The squirrels got a feast and a workout that year.
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@MarkReed : There were squirrels where I grew the 2nd generation walnut seedlings. Lovely to think that the squirrels buried nuts all over the neighborhood.
The places that I am currently planting walnuts do not have tree squirrels. There may be ground squirrels in the general ecosystem.
English walnut, hickory, and pecan are just outside of their hardiness zone here. We’ve managed to move the English walnuts up-slope 650 feet (1 USDA zone). I’m currently planting into an area that’s another 550 feet higher in elevation. A few planted black walnuts grow in the area.
The closest area that I know where I could sweep pecans off the street is 3 USDA zones warmer, and 400 miles to the south.
So, a little bit more about my feelings on apples.
When I moved in there were two apple trees and one (incredibly fragrant) flowering crabapple here.
The crabapple clearly breeds somewhat true at least somewhat, because it’s seeded in a spot in the back pasture.
The two apple trees combined make really lovely sauce, though neither is my favourite alone. I consider them year one of my landrace, along with all the apples trees in the neighbourhood.
I feel a lot of gratitude for those trees: things grow slowly there, and someone long in the past planted them and I’m enjoying them. I wouldn’t have planted the one just for flowers, but the scent drifts across the yard and is lovely, it probably pollinates things, and every fall it hosts cedar waxwings for a week as they strip the tiny pinkie-sized fruit on their way through.
It feels really fitting to collect some of those seeds and plant them out back – they really should do well, since the parent trees have survived so much. And then since I’m doing that anyhow, I’ll give them some friends from apples I liked the taste of (still more impressed with those Lucy Glo than anything) and some skillcult apples from his hardier/earlier crosses and a couple grafts of named varieties I find exciting.
When those fruit I’ll certainly select and then replant some seed.
It’s more than I’ll need, and honestly the community doesn’t need more apples (they’re a real hazard here, with the bears in fall and moose in winter, but I feed mine to the geese and pigs and the dogs keep the wilder animals mostly away) but I probably plant them more for the idea of someone like my younger self stumbling into the back field someday and discovering their own apple that no one else has ever tasted. So to respond to your comment about necessity, @JesseI , it seems like to me, when I grow something, that element of possible discovery is more necessary than any particular result. And as you say, the diversity in apples makes them a good platform for discovery.
I have yet to determine whether, if a seedling tastes bad, I’ll cull it completely or just graft something tasty onto it. As with everything, I expect a lot of winter kill (we’re hitting -35C this week with only 6" of snow, I’m curious about what will survive until spring).
Also one of my more favourite hobbies is tasting apples from any obviously-seedling ones I see as I’m driving around. It’s true they mostly aren’t tasty. There was a fascinating clump in town here with obviously several different seedlings from what looked like one core. One of the seedlings was highly tannic with big green apples and a thick fleshy piece that extended along the stem, almost like the inverse of a pomegranate which has that fleshy bit at the other end. I didn’t take seeds from it this year, but I know where it lives.
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What I meant it’s not necessary to grow them like landrace or landrace them as they already have the genetic diversity just as much as any single plant of landrace of other species. You could grow out relatively small amount of seeds to try and find something that suits your needs, but if you were to grow it like a landrace plants that have different heritage and over generations that would expand quite a bit and be more like breeding operation. Not saying either way is bad, but I would consider that kind of breeding more like landracing, although it may never end up as fully developed landrace as it’s just not necessary.
Put another way, any fruit trees grown from seeds in our local environment are probably ALREADY local landraces, because they were never inbred in the first place.
Which is a great reason to continue breeding them for future generations.
I love the perspective of thinking thousands of years in the future, of the fruits are descendants will be eating.
Yes, kinda. The sheer scale of time and space relative to human life makes them quite hard to put in the context of landracing. I think domestic apple (or any domestic fruit) in it’s self could be considered landrace or several landraces that overlap, atleast based on genetics. Scale is too big for one person to landrace, but it’s possible to be part of your local landrace.
Yeah. I think local fruit tree populations are probably an excellent example of the original meaning of the term “landrace.” The modern meaning tends to involve starting with a hybrid swarm, but the point of that is to reverse inbreeding depression in order to start a healthy landrace. In a hundred years, assuming some of our landraces are maintained, they will be landraces in the traditional sense. So I think, for a population that isn’t inbred in the first place, I think it’s accurate to say they’re a landrace already.
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I dont think fruit trees are that far along that they are much more locally adabted than landrace that is started from heirlooms is at 5 to 6 generations if there is lot of cross pollination. In theory 5 generations could have 32 unique parent varieties and there will be saturation point quite soon where basic make up of a landrace is quite uniform. From outside they might look like they are completely different, but it’s just small amount of genes that make up the difference. Same goes the other way, 2 that look the same might only have looks in common. For example, no 2 humans have more than 0.1% difference in genetic make up. So genetic diversity might give slighly wrong impression. Species is made up mostly of same genes and there is limited amount of those that make up the difference. Getting new genes means losing some old. Sometimes you might loose unnecessary and gain good, but it might be other way around or they might have been as good/bad. Randomness of life.
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Part of my strategy for landrace trees includes guerilla gardening. Planting trees into suitable locations in the wider ecosystem. Burying apple cores along the river. Tossing plum and apricot pits into non-mowed areas where they might sprout and grow a tree.
I use a slingshot, which really helps to get seeds into suitable micro-ecosystems where they might have a chance of thriving. The slingshot is also wonderful for delivering Fukuoka’s seed balls. I spew propagules of edible species into the ecosystem. Some of them will grow, and feed my family and community a hundred years from now.
My guiding light for this strategy is the grove of apricot trees that grows where my daddy had a food-fight with his cousin seventy years ago.
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Ha ha ha! A slingshot! I love that! It’s so much more fun when relaxation, fun, and whimsy are all thorough parts of your planned strategy.
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