...or crimes against nature, depending on your perspective. allow me to explain.
i've ordered a number of fruit trees to plant in our new yard from raintreenursery.com and ediblelandscaping.com, which is a virginia nursery specializing as you might guess, edible landscaping. i'm actually pretty excited. i've order blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, a variety of kiwi propagated from a specimen growing on a fence at the national arboretum in DC, a persimmon tree, an apple tree and a fruit cocktail tree.
a what?
a fruit cocktail tree. yeah, i never heard of it before either. (thanks tobin!)
commercial fruit trees are not grown from seeds. if they were, you'd never know exactly what kind of quality fruit you'd get because the seed would have genetic material from two different trees. so let's say you want red delicious apples. you grow a root system, cut it off above the ground and graft on sprig cut from a red delicious tree. the two parts fuse together and you get an tree with roots from one type of apple tree and branches and fruit from another.
well if one graft is good, obviously more is better. turns out that you can graft multiple types of fruit from the same family onto the same rootstock. so for instance, the apple tree i order has grafts from akane, jonagold, gala and spartan apples. the fruit cocktail tree is either a plum or a peach root system and grows four different kinds of stone fruit: peaches, plums, apricots & nectarines.
if anyone knows where i can get a lemon, lime and blood orange or clementine tree, let me know!
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