Sophie Watts studies one of the largest, most diverse apple orchards in the world, including more than 1,000 varieties of apples to figure out how we can breed apples that are tastier and more sustainable.
“We need to create apples that can withstand climate change temperatures, pests and diseases and that are of course still tasty. However, our ability to create improved apples is limited because we keep growing and relying on a few select varieties.”
This article was originally published in The Conversation Canada on November 21, 2021. Indica and sativa are commonly used to describe cannabis strains, but what’s the difference between these two labels? Almost half of all Canadians have tried cannabis at some point in their lives. If you’re one of them, you’ve probably been confronted with […]
In Canada, four apple cultivars make up over half of all apples that are produced. In comparison, there are an estimated 10,000 apple cultivars that exist worldwide including immense diversity in flavours, shapes and colours. Apart from the popular cultivars like McIntosh, Ambrosia, Honeycrisp and Gala that dominate apple production, here is a list of […]
Reports of cherries roasting in orchards in Western Canada made headlines during the record-breaking heat wave in June. More recently, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent due to the accelerating and intensifying effects of climate change. The multiple days of […]
You’ve probably heard the saying “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. In reality, eating an apple a day won’t guarantee fewer trips to the doctor, but apples are still nutritious and an important part of diets globally. The nutrition provided by apples is in part due to high levels of phenolic compounds. Phenolic […]
They say all good things take time, and this surely is the case when it comes to apple breeding, as it can take over 25 years to develop a new apple variety. Recently, new gene-editing tools like CRISPR have demonstrated their potential to improve plant breeding by allowing us to efficiently edit genes to create […]
Biodiversity can be a difficult concept to pin down and for good reason: this one term aims to encapsulate the variety of all life on earth. By taking a look around a garden or a park, you’ll see biodiversity in action through the different plants growing or insects buzzing around. On a large scale, biodiversity […]
Just like results of a DNA test could disrupt a person’s understanding of their family tree, an apple can also be subject to surprising revelations about its ancestry. This was the case for one of the most commercially successful apples on the market today, the Honeycrisp. In 2005, it was discovered that Honeycrisp’s parents were […]
One of the largest, most diverse apple orchards in the world is found in Kentville, Nova Scotia. This orchard has over 1,000 cultivars of apples from over 40 different countries. To put the number of cultivars into perspective, if you ate an apple a day from this orchard, it would take you over three years […]
