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Although there are more than 7000 named apple varieties, actually, only 17 clonal varieties, each with production of more than 1 million bushels annually, make up 91 percent of total production in the U.S. More Delicious are produced than any other variety. Mclntosh is second. These two varieties are more than a third of the total. (A clonal variety is one which is produced directly from a portion of the plant, such as a bud or shoot, and not from seed. All standard Delicious trees, for example, have been propagated from a single tree which showed a deviation that was desirable.) There are a great number of sports. A sport is a sudden spontaneous deviation or variation of an organism from type, beyond the usual limits of individual variation. Apple growers are on the lookout for tree limbs that show fruit with favorable variations, such as more red color or color that comes out earlier. Many new sports are announced every year; and now sports of sports (sometimes called super- sports) are coming out, and there are already sports of super- sports. It would take far more space than is available here to list and describe the sports. For example there is Starkrimson which is a super-sport of Red Delicious, and there are already many super-super-sports of Starkrimson. Some of the sports are spur-type trees on which fruit spurs are formed along scaffold limbs, and fruit is produced on practically all parts of the tree
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