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When I was a child I used to hate the seeds that you found in oranges, watermelons, and grapes.  They were just a major inconvenience when trying to enjoy a piece of fruit.  For the longest time this put me off to many types of fruit that were not organized enough to keep their seeds in the core, where they belonged.

Now days I’m wanting to grow my own grape vines, and without seeds in the grapes this means I’m going to have to go buy vines at a nursery somewhere.  That really doesn’t bother me, even though I prefer to grow everything I grow from a seed.

What bothers me is that as an adult, I’ve started to realize that these food stuffs SHOULD have seeds in them.  The watermelons not having seeds just doesn’t seem right.  Oranges and grapes have been seedless forever, and I guess I’ve just grown used to it.  But since when have watermelons been seedless? Has this been going on for a while and I just noticed it?

Is this some kind of conspiracy to keep people buying their produce rather than growing their own or do the famers really just care about what their customers want?  Do they really think they’re helping you by saving you the trouble of having to spit out a seed?

A small amount of research indicated to me that all of these fruit (and possibly others) are in some way a mutation.  Seedless grapes are all grown from cuttings of other seedless vines.  Seedless watermelons are essentially mules of the watermelon world where the offspring come in three varieties; regular seeded, seedless, and a sort of mixed seedless/seeded type from which next year’s plants are grown.  Naval oranges are all derived from one original mutant tree and each tree from that point on was spawned asexually from a mutant parent.

They’re feeding us mutants.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

So, uhm, yeah.