Read about this guy. Saved different apple varieties. People used to make their own apple cider from their own orchards. Over time this fell out of fashion or something.

He's been hunting old orchards collecting scions every since. Saving different apple varieties.

People don't actually understand how difficult this task is. It's not as simple as preserving a strain of, say, tomatoes or cucumbers. For example, here is a guy who revived a lost strain of tomatoes from 87 year old seeds (youtu.be).

You can't do this with apples. Taking an apple and growing the trees from those seeds doesn't work and will actually produce an entirely different type of tree (and usually a fucking disgusting fruit). That's how you get crab apple trees, people tasted an apple and we're like "hmm this tastes good, we should grow more in our town" and then it reaches maturity and starts shitting out horrible bitter tasting fruit nobody wants to eat. Here's a video that explains why (youtu.be)

So from the video, an estimated 1 in 80,000 trees produces good tasting fruit. Every apple you see in the picture represents 79,999 other shitty tasting crab apple trees to arrive at that point.

So in order for him to preserve these fruits, he actually literally has to clone the tree itself. They are entirely unique and once they die, they cannot be replicated, even if you have the seeds.

Honest question, how in the fuck do you even go about determining one variety from another? That's confusing to me since there's so many varieties in shape from apple to apple of the same variety, half of these green ones look the same, half of these yellow ones look the same, half of these red ones look the same.

Apples don't really work like that...