Dogs and Oranges and Apples and Coffee

Dogs and Oranges and Apples and Coffee was Originally Posted on January 20, 2013 by lavarock

Purebred dogs and navel oranges have a commonality, believe it or not. Here is why I say that.

With purebred dogs we have a registry whereby we can track parentage and lineage. Supposedly I can track my Labradors back to “olden times”.

From Wikipedia:

The first and second Earls of Malmesbury, who bred for duck shooting on his estate, and the 5th and 6th Dukes of Buccleuch, and youngest son Lord George William Montagu-Douglas-Scott, were instrumental in developing and establishing the modern Labrador breed in 19th century England. The dogs Avon (“Buccleuch Avon”) and Ned given by Malmesbury to assist the Duke of Buccleuch’s breeding program in the 1880s are considered the ancestors of modern Labradors.

Thus since we “register” some relatives, we can track those registered back into the past. We track these for many reasons, one is to allow us to breed certain characteristics in or out of a line of dogs. We also can now do some very good tracking of genetics to assure certain offspring will not have certain diseases.

So how are oranges and apples involved? Well let’s see if I can make a parallel. Navel oranges don’t have seeds and therefore cannot reproduce from seeds.

Again we skip to Wikipedia:

Today, navel oranges continue to be propagated through cutting and grafting. This does not allow for the usual selective breeding methodologies, and so all navel oranges can be considered fruits from that single nearly two-hundred-year-old tree: they have exactly the same genetic make-up as the original tree and are, therefore, clones. This case is similar to that of the common yellow seedless banana, the Cavendish. On rare occasions, however, further mutations can lead to new varieties.

So we can track the orange back that way. Well apples have seeds, so wassup with that?

Each seed, when germinated, can grow to become a new specimen tree. However, the new tree inherits characteristics of both its parents, and it will not grow ‘true’ to the variety of either parent from which it came. That is, it will be a fresh individual with an unpredictable combination of characteristics of its own. Although this is desirable in terms of producing novel combinations from the richness of the gene pool of the two parent plants (such sexual recombination is the source of new cultivars), only rarely will the resulting new fruit tree be directly useful or attractive to the tastes of humankind. Most new plants will have characteristics that lie somewhere between those of the two parents.

Therefore, from the orchard grower or gardener’s point of view, it is preferable to propagate fruit cultivars vegetatively in order to ensure reliability. This involves taking a cutting (or scion) of wood from a desirable parent tree which is then grown on to produce a new plant or ‘clone’ of the original. In effect this means that the original Bramley apple tree, for example, was a successful variety grown from a pip, but that every Bramley since then has been propagated by taking cuttings of living matter from that tree, or one of its descendants.

So to ensure reliability, they graft.

As for coffee, we often grow plants from seeds. However, we have found that some varieties of coffee trees have bad coffee but good rootstock. Our Kona Arabica has good coffee beans but a less desirable rootstock. Thus some farms take the good coffee top and graft it on the good rootstock, giving the coffee tree a great root structure without effecting the taste of the coffee.

Since some of the trees I have mentioned here grow tall and we are in effect talking about grafting, I thought about calling this “Graft in High Places” but thought better of it.