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RE: Have you ever grown an apple tree from a seed?
In as late as the 1930's the USDA statistics agency NASS estimated there was over 500 varieties of apple commercially grown in the states. That wasn't that long ago. Nowadays it's about 50 but only a decade earlier it was a dozen or so if you can believe that. The same catastrophe happened in the UK where the revival of local varieties is still slow in coming with collections of trimmings from garden trees from communities across the country. Some varieties are certainly lost forever.
Same here in Austria and Germany and I think in many many other countries. And not only fruit is affected, but also vegetables. There are initiatives that are working to make people aware of this fact. They search, propagate and preserve old varieties and campaign to ensure that many people grow old varieties again.
Once there's a healthy selection, you can turn to breeding new varieties and at that point it should be easy and quick to do so.
Its frustrating to witness the decline in the genetic diversity of plants. I really get fired up about it. That's why we grow & save heirloom seeds. It really is up to all of us to do our part to preserve and safeguard all that we can. There was an initiative here to start a living museum of all the apple varieties but it didn't get enough support. It certainly feels shameful that all the work our ancestors did to grow and save all of this plant life has been lost due to apathy.
We are going to learn how to graft so we can bring some of these varieties onto our property. I suppose the best we can do is to do something right?
Seed from every apple variety could be stored with the Noah seed bank so the disappearance of thousands of varieties is never repeated.
It's really scary how quickly we have lost/destroyed the genetic diversity of plants, animals. I just read this sobering CBC article that shares some of the bleak stats from the latest UN scientific reports. We do our best to do our part to help. I grow and save only heirloom seeds .. about 19 types of tomatoes this year - keeping it alive in our back yard where we have control.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/un-biodiversity-reports-1.4589698?cmp=FB_Post_News
I applaud your work homesteading, preserving tomato and apple varieties, especially in light of the degradation of the natural environment and the dismal projections of species die off.
This is very worrisome as diversity is a measure of ecological durability and resilience (though not necessarily of vitality which is what is implied by "health"; evidently scientists are not the best with language).