Robert Suitto, age 10, of Schenectady, N.Y., for his question:
HOW DO WE GET NEW TREES FROM NAVAL ORANGES?
The world is facing shortages of human food supplies. This is sad, but sensible folk refuse to sit down and cry about it. Instead, those who have a back yard or even a flower pot get busy and strive to grow some for themselves. Aside from leaving more store bought food for others, these fascinating projects tempt us to explore other mysteries of :the plant world. Oranges, of course, cannot survive the cool winters in New York. But your splendid apples and peaches do not sprout from seeds or pits, either.
Nowadays we take our wide variety of delicious fruits for granted. But all of them started out as scraggly wild trees, bearing sour little fruits or berries. They were pampered, coddled and improved by countless generations of patient gardeners. And the most important discovery was a clever device called grafting.
A seedling from an orange or apple bears the same sour little fruits of its ancestors. Long ago some unknown genius made a fantastic discovery. A twig from one tree can be grafted to grow from the stem of another tree of a similar type. The two in one tree keeps the root system from the old stem and its boughs produce the sort of fruit on the tree from which the twig was taken.
Meantime, better orchard trees were selected and improved. But often the seedlings reverted to wild ancestors and often the pampered root systems were weak. Both problems are solved by grafting. A sturdy ancestral type is selected to provide the stock, or root system. It is cut down to a few inches above the ground.
A twig, or scion, is taken from the tree that bears lush oranges or some other fruit. It is grafted to provide the trunk and boughs, which bear superior type fruit.
Grafting works because growth occurs in a slim layer of cells below the bark. When properly sliced and sealed in place, these special cells grow together and merge to create the two in one tree.
Seedless oranges and most other orchard trees inherit sturdy root systems from wild type ancestors, plus boughs that bear fruit just like the pampered types.