Jonathan McRae

Like, did we not need sweet apples to breed with the bitter apples to get something like the pink lady?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so the sweetness that we have, that's come from essentially crossbreeding.

There's not too much.

I mean, sorry, I always have to preface that question because there always is way more to learn about it than I thought.

But I was going to say there's not really much to think about when it comes to how we have modern apples in that we just crossbreed one plant with another and get a...

a slightly sweeter or a slightly redder or a slightly less pippy fruit.

Is that right?

Is that hard?

Is it a hard thing to do?

But how many times can you actually do that in a human lifetime, given that these are apple trees, right?

They don't grow overnight.

When you're selecting trees for breeding, you have to wait a number of years before they are even close to letting you know what sort of fruit they bear, right?

And so with, say you have a strong candidate and you want to make it better.

Do you like, do you have like the one seed of a strong candidate and then just make 50 different trees and then pick the best one of those 50, but like 50 different species?

Or is it really controlled in terms of what you make?

Do you need a lot of individuals to be able to get a general gist?

Because of course there's variability among individuals.

in individuals.