[hinkley]

Sourcing plants that are both genetically diverse and provably not the result of poaching is quickly rising to the top of my list of unsolved problems. One nursery I know of may be both (cloning poached plants). Fruit trees have so much trouble with pathogens and pests and inclement weather in part because you have an entire field full of clones of the same plant. What takes out one is going to take them all out.

I may also need to reread the rules on gathering from public lands. My memory has condensed down to 'no'.

[derekp7]

So the problem with some fruit plants is they have to be cloned to get the fruit. For example if you plant an apple seed, chances are good that you won't get a desirable apple. You have to plant a bunch of them, wait until they develop fruit, then when you find one that is good you clone it.

[saalweachter]

The good news is that all apples are cider apples.

So you plant your orchard of hundreds of apple seeds, harvest them for cider, and taste them as you go along.

[hinkley]

I’m waiting to see if my crabapples will be jelly apples, cider apples, or applesauce apples.

[timClicks]

Bananas are worse. All of the world's commercial plants are Cavendish bananas, and they are all clones.

[7thaccount]

Yeah. They all used to be Gros Michel (spelling), but they all died out in the 1950s due to disease.

[hinkley]

Something to be said for native fruits here. Usually though cultivars have double to quadruple the amount of meat, though there are exceptions in both sides.

The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

[EdwardDiego]

Apples are particularly bad, as they're "extreme heterozygotes". Good for avoiding pests in the wild. Bad when you want to plant more of the same tree.

[wildzzz]

It's usually against the law to take plants from places like national parks. Sometimes there's more leeway in taking things from national forests but it's probably a bad idea unless you have permission. Poaching succulent propagations is a big issue in some parks so rangers actively look for it.

[hinkley]

I think for some even taking the fruit is a no no. I’m working in my germination skills before I start that process. With wild gathering you need to know a lot more about a plant than you need to know in order to buy it from a nursery. That’s a barrier for most.

[jrumbut]

I'm glad to see someone else thinking about this and probably thinking deeper about it than I did.

About 8 years ago I put some hours into the idea of responsibly sourced (genetic diversity was a secondary priority since I was focusing on the hobbyist grower rather than farming, the plan was very much to use clones but also create new seeds from time to time if possible) exotic/ornamental/carnivorous plants with the idea of it being a long term side business.

Probably more of an excuse to play with automated horticulture than it was a way to solve a global problem.

I hope someone attacks it at scale though, I would love to see that.

[hinkley]

It’s all flown out of my head but there is a government agency that banks seeds and if you say the right things they will send you some (or you can send them some). I didn’t have any luck germinating those seeds and have since forgotten who I asked and when. Not sure if I still have the original correspondence, or how I would find it (I’m not entirely sure I recall what species I asked for, which would probably be the best search criteria).

[BurningFrog]

If you poach one plant and clone hundreds of copies, your operation has a pretty low damage footprint.