Ever been curious about what would happen if you saved the seeds from that apple, peach or even orange you had for lunch? You might discover a fruit that's never existed before!

Let me start off this article by stating something you probably already know if you've been following along with my Garden Guide over the past few years. I believe in starting many plants from seed. Tomatoes, peppers and basil are just a few fast-growing, tasty plants that are great candidates to grow from seed. However, gardeners trying to save a few dollars can sometimes fall for seed scams.

This isn't the main topic of today's story, but I really want to put it out there: there are a lot of fake things on the internet, and they're getting easier to fall for. I've seen countless advertisements using AI-generated images of funky-looking hostas, hibiscus and hydrangea (just to name a few) all trying to sell you seeds. It’s just a few dollars. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, a lot.

These scams won't sell you seeds that are true to the type of plant you want. Worse, they could be selling seeds of invasive species that harm our ecosystem by outcompeting the native plants wildlife rely on to survive. I recommend doing a little extra research on the seller and the plant before you buy seeds online. Many of my most unusual and fun plants have come from seeds I purchased online, so I don’t want to discourage you from buying something great - just from buying something fake.

The fruits we eat are often clones of a single tree someone decided they liked a long time ago. Some of your favorites, like honeycrisp, came from breeding programs that selected for specific genes. Starting fruit trees from seed leads to completely unpredictable results. The fruit may not have enough flesh to eat, or it might not taste good at all. Plus, it can take many years for a tree grown from seed to mature enough to bear fruit.

To ensure consistent fruit, growers clone the original tree. It sounds like science fiction, but there's a gardening technique invented thousands of years ago that makes this possible: grafting.

Grafting is the process of taking a branch from a mature tree with desirable traits and attaching it to a compatible rootstock. The result is two entirely different trees growing as one, sharing genetic information while still growing as individuals. This guarantees that the fruit your tree produces is exactly what you want. Plus, the grafted tree will produce fruit at a much younger age and smaller size because the branches are already from a fruiting-age tree.

For this Garden Guide, we spoke with Sam Van Aken, a legendary artist who has grafted 40 different fruit varieties onto a single tree. The result is an incredible combination of art, history and botany. You can see his work locally on Governors Island and at Planting Fields in Oyster Bay, New York. Learn more about Sam Van Aken HERE.

There are a few fruits that will produce offspring nearly identical to the parent due to a phenomenon called nucellar embryony. In this process, the embryos are derived entirely from maternal tissue, so the resulting plants are genetically identical to the mother.

This trait is common in most citrus fruits like lemons, oranges and kumquats, and also found in mangoes. Growing these from seed will produce trees that create fruit just like the mother plant. However, they will still take longer to fruit than the grafted varieties you'll find at local nurseries.