What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast on this day before Independence Day in America.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Today I'm taking a question from Phil Koster who emailed me and asked,

why can't I grow certain types of apples

from seeds of that apple?

Which is a fantastic question.

And the answer to that question is something that will reveal more about gardening

and plants than just apples.

So let's get into it.

We're going to learn why you might not want to grow apples from seed?

That's the first thing.

What are some problems that could occur

if you do try to grow apples from seed?

And then, where do new varieties of apples come from?

So first, why might you not want to grow apples from seed?

Well the short answer here is that apples do not reproduce true to type and what that means is that the tree from the seed that you

plant will produce apples that are almost guaranteed to be different from that

parent apple. You can have fun, you can experiment, but you

shouldn't expect to have the same fruit. Part of the reason for this is that most apple varieties are self-unfruitful.

And what that means is that the apple blossoms have to be fertilized with the pollen of a separate variety in order to achieve good fruit set.

And what that means is that the fruit produced will be the same as the parent tree,

but the seeds of that tree will be across between the two different varieties.

So if you have a tree of apples that you really like,

...