Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson hour. I'm Clay Jenkins and David Swenson is taking a break.

I sat down the other day for a conversation with my dear friend Pat Bradowski, formerly the head gardener at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

We had a wonderful and spirited conversation. Let's pick it up from there.

We're talking with Pat Bradowski, former head gardener at Monticello, who knows so much about track.

No, well, of course, but so I've been meaning to ask you. So I was in Somerset in England, the south of England, and I was out of place where John Steinbeck spent seven months and they had some apples on the ground.

So I brought back a couple of those apples and I pulled the seeds.

All right, so far so good. Now, how do I produce an apple tree from?

The problem here is, and you know this, the genetics of the apple seed are all different. So every, every apple seed that sprouts for you is going to be a different apple. It's not going to be the one that fell off the tree.

Why?

It's because that's the way it is. And so like Johnny apple seed, you know, he collected all the apples seeds from the citeries and brought them out on the, I guess they will hire a river and was propagating apples.

And because every homesteader had to have 50 apple trees to mark his territory. So he had a market, you know, like established. So, that's why we have so many different varieties of apples available.

You just have to see in like three to five years, five to seven years, when it finally gives a fruit, if you really like that fruit or not.

All right, so let's say I go to the grocery store today.

I'm going to go to the grocery store for, for green house and I buy a honey crisp and I buy a golden delicious and I, and I buy the one that's covered with the green cover.

What's that called?

Granny Smith.

Granny Smith.

And I pull the seeds out of them, then I keep them separate. And I do a kind of a scientific experiment worthy of Mr. Jefferson and I put the granny Smith seeds are in one plot and the honey crisp and another and the third year saying, there is no way of doing what apple tree grows from these.

That's right. And then from the honey crisp, which is a hybrid.

And it's been selected and hybridized and intentionally manipulated, you know, you don't know what you're going to get.

So they propagate millions of honey crisp apples.

You take a soil and you take the branch itself.

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