APPLES WITHOUT CORES

Shannon News, 11 January 1927, Page 2

APPLES WITHOUT CORES

TEACHING NATURE HOW TO GROW FRUIT.

Seedless apples will be in Covent Garden 'when .the next autumn crops flourish in September (says-the "Observer”). The slogan will be that you can eat all the apple however much your taste may have been exatled by dinners at the Savoy and the Rite. There may be a faded resemblance to a core lelt, but, according to the promises, it will be the kind of core which makes you want more of it. Why not ? Seedless oranges, seedless lemons and seedless grapefruit have been familiar to us for years. They have a rich flavour, and you can eat every bit of them, barring the skin. The seedless apple was first' grown by Mr. Buzzel, of Abbotsford, in the Province of Quebec, who exhibited It at a show at Boston last year. A seedless fruit is rather like a milch cow. It improves on the methods of Nature by devoting itself to the sustenance a,nd enjoyment of .tfcs human being. The seedless Unit ioe* not bother about the f./opagation of its own Species. It grafts itself on branches grown from fruit with seeds. The seedy mother provides the fecundity; the seedless "fruit gives the pulp the flavour.

The seedless apple takes its idea from the seedless orange In California, which was a frealk of Nature discovered over 100 years ago. About IS2O a missionary in Bahia, Brazil, discovered a new kind of orange growing wild which contained seeds of propagation not in its own body, but la a little self-contained sac at the top. He sent twelve of the trees to the -United States. They did not live long, but others were budded from them, and they are budding in plenteousnesa •till.

The Spanish padres fathered them. Mrs. Elizabeth Tibbetts carried on he good work and mothered them, and one of the orange trees which she planted in 1873 is still alive and producing good fruit. “Washington Navels” they are called and “Washington Navels" are a pride of dessert tables of distinction to this day. They have no seeds at all.

Valencias come next, and about a seed apiece. It is perhaps as. well that they retain it, for California grows most of the best oranges of the world, and if, there are no seeds there will soon be no oranges, which would be bad for the 11.000 master growers who now market their fruit from the State under that famous organisation they ha/ve devised, known as Califor- ' nian Fruit Growers’ Exchange. , Seedless oranges do not grow wild, and they are not plucked from the tree as Adam and Eve plucked them. Selected seeds are sown in frames: not till the seedlings are two years old are they “budded” with the kind of seedless orange desired; and it is six years before a crop of marketable oranges comes, after a lot of fumigating in the dark and keeping warm by Btoves in the frost. , Californian growers of seedless oranges are both interested and hopeful about the Quebec experiment in, > seedless apples. They see no reason why it should not succeed.