Apple growing

From: Mikko Rintasaari (rintasaa@mail.student.oulu.fi)
Date: Thu 05 Oct 2000 - 01:54:58 EEST


: Benedict Adamson wrote thusly

:IIRC, in the RW, apple growing was a late invention of civilization
:(? Roman). Because it depends on grafting (?), which is not an
:immediately obvious way of growing a tree (?).
:
:So how is in Glorantha? Do eating-apple trees grow from
:eating-apples? Or are they grafted?

This is a bit muddled.

Grafting is used to get a consistent breed of apple, an interesting form
of cloning infact.

Apples do reproduce quite like any other tree. All you have to do to get
an apple tree, is to plant a seed. Seed grown appletrees have had their
genes shuffled about by sexual reproduction and the taste of the apples
varies widely.

Grafting:
If you like the apples of a given tree, you can take a small branch of the
tree, cut the top off a sapling, and join them. You get the roots of the
sapling, but the branches and the rest of the tree (including apples) will
be a clone of the tree whose apples you liked.

There are even favored root-trees, that make good saplings for which to
attach a good branch.

I may be wrong here, but I think that grafting is actually a very old
thing, and was practised in ancient greece way before 0 AD. I will check
this.

In Dragon Pass I'd think there are Earth cultists that would know about
grafting, and elves that can make the appletrees "genes" do a song and
dance number for them, but most appletrees would be grown from seeds, and
the results vary widely.

        -Adept the biologist

I think I think... Therefore I think I am.

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