Ok this picture really doesn’t do that justice.
You see a bunch of apples and think ok he collected seeds. No no, apple seeds do not grow an identical tree to what they came from. To get the identical product from an apple tree you have to cut a branch off the one you want to save and splice it onto a donor tree. So dude has to have a orchard with trees of different varieties and apple trees just generally have a limited lifespan and are also constantly trying to kill themselves in stupid ways.
Can confirm. My parents got 2 apple trees when I was a kid. One of them just kept trying as hard as it could to lean to one side. They had to put lots of steaks and straps on it to correct it for many years. That same tree then started growing apple flowers much earlier than it should and it would have so many apples that the branches would break under the weight. So my parents had to pick as many flowers as they could off the tree each year until it was a healthy size. Skip to today and it’s a pretty healthy tree, but much smaller than the other tree that didn’t try to do stupid shit to itself. Except this year, my parents had to pick all the apples early before they were ready because the branches started cracking and splitting. They tried to give it lots of extra water and strap the branches back together that they caught in time, but it still lost some for good. This tree just doesn’t want to tree.
TIL trees can lose the will to live (or gain the will to die maybe?)
It’s the way they’re made, you basically grow a tree to sacrifice and jam whatever variety you’re trying to grow on top of that so as to utilize it’s root structure.
https://orchardpeople.com/grafting-fruit-trees/
Plants are dope, I found all this by trying to prove the 40 fruit tree was bogus but no that’s an actual thing you can do with some fruits. So like a plum, apple and an orange from the same tree.
I have a tree like that, ever since a storm that tipped it a little I have to keep strapping it. And the apples are so abundant it wants to fall over. It’s brother is a little smaller but doing fine.
Strapping a split together I take it? Bolt it if you can and brace the limbs up with y shaped broken branches. If you look at real old apple trees you’ll usually see a bunch of braces or places where the limb has been trained to the ground to support itself and then aim back up so it looks a bit wavy.
https://www.themarthablog.com/2025/04/supporting-old-apple-trees.html
you cant save someone if they want to sucide
This is especially cool. Apple trees grown from seed don’t produce the same apples as the fruit they grew from. In order to do that, you have to grow a new tree from a cutting of an existing tree.
This guy went and found trees, mostly in NC, TN, VA, WV. Dude is a straight hero.
https://applesearch.org/Junaluska_Apple_Discovery.html
e: I noted elsewhere that someone along the way had changed the sign behind him in this picture, presumably to prevent him being inundated with contacts. I only posted the above link after reading through the site and coming to the conclusion that he wants people to find lost apples, and would appreciate the help.
The quest giver NPC needs to be named some kind of punny version of “Johnny Appleseed.”
Why’d they edit Tom’s sign to say “Glommons”, I wonder? Heritage is in Clemmons, NC, a little town outside Winston Salem
That is curious. The area code doesn’t belong to NC either. I wonder if they’re just trying to make it so he doesn’t get harassed.
Oh yeah, could be. Well good on them for looking out for him
