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NARR: If you save the seeds from a Red-Delicious apple or a Bartlett Pear and plant them in the ground you'll get a tree that produces apples or pears. If you were eating grapes with seeds - you might be tempted to try the same thing.
MOORE: Yes you can plant them in your backyard and yes you will get grapevines that should give you grapes. What you cannot be sure of however is that those grapes that you get from those seeds that you planted will be the same kind of grape in the way it looks and tastes as the grape those seeds came from.
NARR: Gerry Moore is director of science at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He says Grapes are genetically different from pears or apples which are clones of their parent trees. Grapes on the other hand reproduce sexually. Seeds from THAT union are genetically diverse. Every grape seed shares traits of both mom and dad.
MOORE: The pollen comes from one individual and the egg comes from another individual. It's not all that different from humans in that plants have two copies of every gene.
NARR: Like human children, every seed is different. So planting them is like a game of genetic roulette; one grape seed could turn out to be almost any variety of grape. But Moore says in order to get grapes your vines will need a pollinator -grains of pollen carried by the wind or an insect.
MOORE: If an individual flower does not get pollinated, it will often times just fall off and no fruit will develop or the fruit will develop but develop in a small abnormal way and not produce a good-quality fruit that you would want to eat.
NARR: The lesson here? If you want to be sure what kind of grapes will grow on your vines, don't start from seed. Find a grape you like and cut a sample from the vine it's growing on. That will ensure that the new plant beard fruit that are identical to the ones you tasted. Gretchen Cuda, Columbia Radio News.