Comment by lm28469

4 days ago

> but I use those 1,000 apples to start my own orchard

Steal cuttings, not the fruit, if you plan to start an orchard. From 1000 apples you'll get ~10 000 seeds, statistically you won't even end up with one good tree.

> An output of three cultivars from around 50.000 seeds means that 17.000 seeds were needed to get one cultivar. Only one out of around 9.000 scab resistant seedlings showed the appropriate quality to become a cultivar. This proportion underlines the enormous effort which is necessary to develop a new cultivar.

https://orgprints.org/id/eprint/13698/1/220-225.pdf