I was wondering if anyone ever heard of a book on the many different kinds of apples that have been cross bred and were no good or didn’t pass the taste test., It would be nice if someone had started keeping notes way back a few hundred years ago and passed the info down.
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I dont know of any book but also dont know that it would offer more than anecdotal value—every cross is a brand-new genetic recombination, so if someone made a terrible cross of say a wickson and a tolman sweet that still doesnt mean the very next seed from the same cross wouldnt be a good one.
Edit: as a good inverse example there are probably a half-dozen golden delicious/cox crosses out there which have survived and been kept around…but out of how many? I assume there were hundreds mediocre enough they were lost over time.
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You’ve hit on a quandary of apple breeding; you cross an ugly apple that tastes good with a pretty apple that taste bad hoping to get a pretty apple that tastes good. But you’re just as likely to get an ugly apple that tastes bad. Genetic marker breeding helps speed this up, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7i3ARUcjQk
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Good topic. And, yes, being able to ‘see’ the 56,000 genes in two apples would assist in speeding toward more “good” crosses and fewer “bad” crosses. But, commercialization and assembly-lining isn’t what amateur growing or even breeding is all about. Right?
Two “good” apples crossed have higher odds of finding a “winner” than crossing two less desirable apples. But, sometimes, two ugly people have a cute kid, and sometimes two apples hardly anybody likes has a seedling that people rave about.
When you’re doing it just for the money…you take all the gambles where the odds are in your favor.
But, if you’re doing it for fun, or for posterity, and for genetic diversity, then you may want to avoid
Red or Golden Delicious, Cox, Macintosh, and even Honeycrisp as your parents…… I would think?
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I don’t think such a ‘book’ exists. But, if you get lucky, some individual may have a journal or notebook of the results they’ve gotten. But I seriously doubt if anyone paid for having it published.
I would be doing it for fun, but if there were such a book, it would save people who have more time behind them than they do in front of them a lot of time. I guess it would even be to easy for the commercial growers if they knew what two parents couldn’t get along.
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But thats the thing: most crosses even of good apples produce inferior offspring. So you cant really look at a successful, OR failed cross, and assume repeating the experiment would produce the same result. It would be like wanting a list of folks who’s first child was a girl, to predict the sex of their second child.
Suppose Davey G tried crossing apple A x B and it was unimpressive…that is the result of most crosses, even the vast majority of crossing events for any 2 apples that did produce an excellent offspring or three. The university of MN or any other large program has dozens if not hundreds of seedlings for any given cross which they grow to evaluation stage, and even when a cross produces a winner a hundred of its siblings may become firewood because they didnt offer anything special.
So a list of what failed would only be a list of what failed “so far” and be a weak indicator at best. I am skeptical that it would save time, other than perhaps a list of pollen-incompatible cultivars.
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I agree completely, this book would not save any time beyond potentially listing pollen incompatible varieties.
For example, John Cripps grew 50,000+ seedlings per year over a few dozen years. The numbers were mind boggling. Most were seedlings from the same cross and almost all of them were poor quality. Some tasted dreadful, others were ok, nothing was all that inspiring. John eventually ended up producing Pink Lady (aka Cripps pink) apples from his breeding program.
A book saying what varieties cross to produce inferior apples would say that the parent stock he used would produce apples that did not pass the taste test. It would be rather misleading as any variety crossed with any variety has the potential to produce something poor, but this is not an indication that they won’t produce something amazing.
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The basic problem with this approach has been shown by several comments above. I can add that with genetics and with the very high level of selection applied to fruits over the last 100 or so years, the problem is that the probability of finding a genetic combination better than anything existing is vanishingly small. I worked up estimates for pecans a few weeks ago. Pecan has been under strong selection pressure for about 150 years now, much less time than apple or other old world fruits. When planting pecan seed from highly selected parents, the odds of getting a good pecan are about 1 in 100. The odds of a very good pecan about 1 in 4000. The odds of finding the next greatest and best pecan are around 1 in 200,000. Apple breeding has been ongoing for so much longer that the odds of finding a better apple than Honeycrisp are in the millions.
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Informative post…thanks for sharing. bb
Frankly, I’m not THAT impressed with Honeycrisp…I’m betting something already exists that’s better.
My Fuji comes close.
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thar’s what I and others would want to know is what has been tried and failed so far, even if two different apples had been tried and failed twenty times over the yrs, no one would spend to much time growing them, but if two apples were tried just once or never, they would be the ones to spend time on. that’s where a book would be nice. now most breeders are keeping records, even back yard breeders,. but yrs ago, most back yard gardeners tried many different apples and never wrote anything down.
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You could search your candidates through GRIN. Most won’t have a pedigree since apples are outcrossers, it pulled up 75 ascessions that have McIntosh as a parent though.
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