Extinguishing apples, and other videos

Karim Habibi strides through his seedling orchard like a god, casually dispensing death. ¶

This is the part of Keeper's Nursery where Karim plants seeds he hopes will grow into tasty new apple varieties. ¶

Most of them don't make the cut. Off with their heads!

The video is one of a growing number on his YouTube channel.

Apple TV

Karim somehow found time to start posting videos last summer, despite being the solo operator of a nursery that grows more than a thousand kinds of fruit trees (mostly apples).

In many of these videos, we walk with Karim as he samples and weighs his new breeds.

A symetrical red apple hanging from a branch

Hamid's Red Pippin, a Keeper's Nursery original

In another, Karim shows us the kitchen-table phase of his breeding program, and walks us through the 4-to-6 year process from seed to fruit.

Still other videos describe other fruits, such as medlars, which are "lip curling" when unripe or unbletted. (And if you do not know what that means, watch!).

Nursery lore

Orchards grow fruit, but the principal product of a nursery like Keeper's is trees, apple varieties propagated by grafting.

So, Karim grows wood, which he grafts onto rootstock to make saplings.

The fruit itself is just a happy byproduct. Breeding new varieties by planting seeds is a sideline.

On YouTube, Karim also instructs us about rootstocks, and in the correct way to plant an apple sapling:

(In the first eight and a half minutes, Karim walks us through the parts of a grafted sapling; the above starts at the planting part.)

I met Karim at a visit to Keeper's last October.

Apple breeding

Most seedlings are duds: the University of Minnsota rejected thousands of trees to produce Honeycrisp and Sweetango.

Karim's success rate is rather better than that, and includes Hamid's Red Pippin and this unnamed variety:

In this context I would be remiss if I did not mention the apple-breeding videos at Skillcult, where Steven Edholm holds court.

One of Steven's points, which he makes at the start of this short video and others, is that you can so grow tasty apples from seed.

You do not need to grow a thousand trees (and kill 999 of them) to breed a good original apple. The odds are better than that.

Adam's Apples

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