Kate Evans

It is pure selection after a lot of evaluation.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I can make new crosses every year because, you know, apple trees bloom every year.

But yes, you're absolutely right.

A seedling tree will take a number of years, maybe five to six years under normal circumstances to start to bloom and fruit.

Yeah, well, apples are very diverse, incredibly diverse.

So when we make a cross-hybridisation, we usually are looking at thousands of seeds.

Certainly hundreds, if not a couple of thousand, is a pretty decent target.

I typically would plant, my annual planting is somewhere around about 5,000 or 6,000 trees and often about 10,000 seed.

You must love apples.

Well, the majority of them are awful.

Oh, really?

Oh, that's so funny.

Well, just because there are so many characteristics within that apple that we want as human consumers to have that great eating experience.

And because the apple is so diverse, because we've got these crab apple type genes floating around in there as well, we need to just always select those out.

Is that a zebra donkey?

There are definitely limitations.

So I am recalling probably about 20, 30 years ago, a colleague of mine when I was working in East Morling in the U.K.,