Theresa Heckenkamp, age 9, of Tacoma, Wash., for her question:
DO APPLE TREES GROW FROM SEEDS?
If you planted a single seed from an apple under satisfactory conditions, eventually you would have a growing apple tree. And after a number of years, the seedling tree would bear apples.
But this isn't the way most apple trees are developed because apples grown from seedlings will generally be smaller and poorer in quality than the original apples.
Today, new apple trees are usually grown from buds. These are cut from a healthy tree that bears plenty of good apples of the kind wanted. The buds are attached to strong roots of seedling apple trees by a grafting process called, not surprisingly, budding.
Apples from a budded tree will be just like those from the trees from which the buds were cut. This process makes it possible for fruit growers to have as many trees as they wish, all bearing the same variety of apples.
Sometimes, however, an apple tree grown from a seed is better than the parent tree. Such a superior seedling may become the parent for a valuable new variety. The popular Delicious and other famous brands of apples started this way.
When a fruit grower starts a new apple orchard, he usually plants his budded trees in rows from 20 to 30 feet apart. Such spacing allows room to spray and cultivate the orchard, and to harvest the fruit conveniently. Apple trees that are taken care of properly will bear good crops for 30 years or more.
The apple is the principal cultivated fruit of Canada. It is grown in all provinces, with the largest crops coming from British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec.
In the United States, Idaho, Oregon and Washington lead the nation. Other important apple producing states include Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and California.
People in ancient Rome enjoyed apples and they took cultivated trees with them into England when they conquered that country. Apple growing soon became popular in England and in many other countries of Europe.
John Endecott, one of the first governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, brought the first apple trees to America from England in 1628. The cultivated varieties of apples gradually spread westward.
There are nearly 7,500 kinds of apples grown in the world today, with more than 2,500 varieties in the United States and Canada. Most are found in home gardens.
But 95 percent of the apples produced in the U.S. and Canada today come from only 17 varieties.