Also, my kids and I planted a lot of seeds, many of which were from the apples I got at Green Bluff. The ones I can remember:

Forelle pear
Comice pear
Rosalynn apple
winter Banana apple
Winesap apple
Unknown peppers, probably of medium heat
small green striped eggplant from an Oriental food store in Spokane
Hazelnuts
Paperbark Maple (from the John A Finch arboretum)
Criterion apple
Cortland apple

It seems like there were more apples.....I cannot remember them all.

So I explain to my daughter that the exciting thing about planting apples seeds is that they don't come true to seed- you never know what you're going to get. You may get apples that are only good for animal feed, or you may get something edible or truly good. The one sure thing is that each apple seedling will be unique. She couldn't understand why this was, why it would be different. She thought that new varieties came from two plants being planted close together. Now, my daughter is 13, very intelligent, has talked about wanting to be some kind of scientist or possibly a lab tech when she grows up, gets an A in science on her report card, and lives on a farm where animal reproduction happens all the time. So I was shocked. I tried to explain it for a minute, got flustered, and then I asked, "don't they teach you about plant reproduction in school?" And she says that they don't teach about any kind of reproduction, including that of plants. So I said, well, didn't they teach you about mitosis and meiosis? And she claims they have not. She says that the teachers at her school do not have to go to college, they just need to be able to read out of the book!!!!!

What. The. Fuck.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to explain meiosis in 5 minutes or less with 4 other kids swarming about making noise? I did not succeed. I hope that she has just forgotten that she was taught this stuff, but in case she hasn't, I guess I need to go through my various science books and find a simple description of how genes combine. Right now I'm just sort of blown away by this......and hoping it's some sort of misunderstanding or mistake. :-/