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Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples
- gitgud 7y agoI never thought apples could be so different... I understand the black swan feeling a lot more now...
- grenoire 7y agoWhat's even more interesting is that the fact that we don't see these is a consequence of the economics surrounding apples, drive by what people perceive and as such want an apple to be.
- CalRobert 7y agoI bought a house with apple trees last year. One of them makes little red apples where the color of the flesh has red streaks, like someone dripped stain on to it or something. They're _wonderful_. The closest I can describe it (and my wife agrees) is that it's like if watermelon jolly rancher actually was a natural flavour. But if you wait more than a day or two after picking they're not particularly good at all. Maybe a John Gidley's Pearmain? ( https://www.fruitid.com/#view/1012 https://www.fruitid.com/#view/1012 ) - but really don't know. Fruitid is great for fruit identification. Grow an apple tree (several, actually, to pollinate each other) is what I'm saying I guess.
- stefanv 7y agoIt may be a type of Redlove apple. The smallest ones are called Redlove Lollipop
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoThat flavor reminds me eating fresh snake fruit in Indonesia. It’s like an Apple that takes tastes like a strawberry (snake fruit has nothing to do with apples, just the texture of its flesh is similar).
- twic 7y agoDiscovery apples look like that: https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/discovery https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/discovery https://www.quickcrop.co.uk/product/discovery-apple-trees https://www.quickcrop.co.uk/product/discovery-apple-trees My dad has a small tree of them. I don't recognise the watermelon flavour, though - but then i don't think i've ever tried Jolly Ranchers.
- zhynn 7y agoYou should check Adam's blog and see if they are already there! http://adamapples.blogspot.com/ http://adamapples.blogspot.com/
- CalRobert 7y agoThanks! It's hard to pick a type for sure though.
- andrewla 7y agoIf the trees were grown from seed, it is almost guaranteed that the apple you have is unique, though it may share some characteristics with other varieties. All apple varietals are grafted (cloned) from the original specimen onto other root stock. It sounds like they don't hold their flavor well, so they're unlikely to be suitable for large-scale commercial cultivation, though apparently there are active communities of apple enthusiasts who would be happy to take cuttings.
- Jedd 7y agoBraddick's Non-pareil That's my favourite apple ever, and I may well have tasted it from one of the only two trees remaining -- at Faversham, Kent, UK. Quite possibly I got them on a really good day, or they just spoke to my taste buds. Either way there's a few thousand apple varieties we know about, yet most people have tried a few dozen. Similarly cherries, and pears. They don't have to look great (TFA images look spectacular) to taste great -- the Braddock is visually unassuming and unappealing
- dmitriid 7y agoI live in Sweden which has an abundance of apples. All year round there are only two or three Apple varieties in the stores: Royal Gala, Golden, Pink Lady. Same goes for pears. Where are the rest of Apple varieties? No one knows. Well, some people do [1] Profits, economics, transportation. [1] https://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/where-have-all-apples-gone-investigation-disappearance-apple-varieties-and-detectives-who https://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/where-have-all-apples-gon...
- teh_klev 7y ago> Where are the rest of Apple varieties? No one knows. From the article: Due to the demands of industrial farming, only a handful of apple varieties make it to stores, and even of those, only the most uniform specimens sit on the shelves. Growers have abandoned many delicious or beautiful varieties that have delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease. Then there's the wholesale destruction of old and disease free orchards which has seen the availability of once popular cultivars vanish. It's a crime really.
- yoz-y 7y ago> delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease All of these are very valid reasons to not try to mass produce them. Even if they would be available from some person's orchard, they would still not be available in the shops or markets.
- wffurr 7y agoThey could be available from local growers during apple season, but they aren't suitable for year round distribution from a central location. Strawberries are noticeably different even at the grocery stores in the summer in New England.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoIt was all lead by the supermarkets, in the UK at least. The two or three favourite varieties in the seventies and eighties have all disappeared. Not because customers no longer like them, but because the supermarkets wanted high yield, large size, taste free apples. More profit, and vast suppliers who'd supply a trillion tonnes at a time. In the space of a decade the entire stock of trees for the UK's number one and two were grubbed up. The customers still wanted them, still asked for them, the supermarket response was "fuck you". Now it's all Royal Gala, Golden Revolting^W Delicious, Pink Lady, Braeburn. All bland balls of taste free sugar.
- ratmice 7y agoThe temperate orchard conservancy is an awesome non-profit, preserving many rare varieties and distributing scions for grafting onto rootstock. They only take orders from December through January (i.e. until the end of this month). http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org/ http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org/
- teh_klev 7y agoThis chap's YouTube channel has a good number of videos about growing apples that are less well known: https://www.youtube.com/user/1sustainablehedonist/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/1sustainablehedonist/videos If you're based in the the UK, the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale grow quite a few different varieties of apple seedlings (and other fruits) and has a reasonable sized seed stock I think you can order from. https://brogdaleonline.co.uk/ https://brogdaleonline.co.uk/ http://www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/index.php http://www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/index.php
- ratmice 7y agoFor what its worth these are unlikely to be from seed, as apples are very unlikely to produce fruit which matches the variety of the parent.
- teh_klev 7y agoYou're right, what's for sale are are rootstock trees. But I believe you can get access to seed stock as well.
- dminor 7y agoApples trees grown from seed actually do not match their parent - they are a genetic mix (just like us). What's more, they will most likely bear fruit that isn't pleasant to eat. All the apple varieties you eat have been cultivated from a single original specimen, via cuttings or (more likely) grafting onto a convenient root stock.
- aaron695 7y agoI assume this was written in response to the gentleman whose hobby was collecting heritage apples (and moonshine stories) in the quite amazing photo - https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eiyy2u/this_mans_collection_of_lost_apple_varieties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eiyy2u/t...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoUsed to live in the middle of town. On a walk with the kids, down 3 blocks and left at the little market onto a dead-end street, at the end was a little hayfield with a pond and an apple tree. The apples on this tree were like cannon-balls. Someone had stacked the fallen ones this way, in little tetrahedral piles of 4. Bigger - not quite soccer balls but impractically, ludicrously large dark apples. Never heard of them, never seen them pictured anywhere. The tree is gone now, the entire meadow and pond turned into condominiums.
- nudemanonbike 7y agoOne of the weird things about apples is that every seed contains very different DNA than whatever it came from. It sounds like that was just a random variation that someone planted. Did the apples taste any good? If they had, you might have been able to sell them. It's very possible that particular variety of apple will never exist again.
- nkrisc 7y agoHow are varieties consistently reproduced then? Cuttings/grafting?
- logfromblammo 7y agoI think most apple varieties intended for mass orchard production are clone cuttings grafted onto dwarfing rootstock. The clone produces consistent fruit, and the dwarfing rootstock produces easily harvested trees.
- wil421 7y agoHow is this unique to Apples? Most fruit trees come from clones. If you buy local the clones will be grafted onto a rootstock that matches your zone. A lot of vegetable seeds are unlikely to produce identical plants from seeds, especially if you have multiple squashes. Hass avocados are clones from the original tress a farmer found in the early 1900s.
- mc32 7y agoFrom what I’ve heard from people who’ve travelled, apples from the Pamir mountains area are closest to wild apples and have some great varieties with great flavor.
- zhynn 7y agoIf you like in-depth apple reviews, I highly recommend Adam's Apples: http://adamapples.blogspot.com/ http://adamapples.blogspot.com/ It's especially fun to learn the jargon (lenticels, calyx, etc).
- MS90 7y agoOne correction, Al Bean took the seeds to the moon, not around them. I can forgive Atlas Obscura for it, however, since the USDA page(1) has it wrong as well...which severely irks me as it's a government website. It says "carried around the moon in the early 1970's by Astronaut Bean on Apollo 13 Flight." Al bean was on Apollo 12, which was in the 1960's, and he walked on the surface. I submitted a ticket to the site linked in (1) to correct it. 1: https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?id=1013751 https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx...
- etrk 7y agoIt now says: Supposedly, seeds were carried by Alan Bean on Apollo 12 (no citation provided). Do you have a citation for this?
- MS90 7y agoI do not. I've been emailing back and forth with the USDA folks and none of us have been able to find any reference to the seeds outside of the Atlas Obscura article. The only special thing I can find information on Bean taking up was a camera timer. They said they'll keep looking to see if they can find anything. I'm curious to know where the author of the book got this information.
- ASB1969 7y agoI also read this Atlas Obscura article-Alan Bean did not carry apple seeds to the moon. All Astronauts have a list of what they personally took on the mission (flags, jewelry, military insignia). Apple seeds was not part of Alan Bean's list. In addition I am unaware of any apple seeds carried as part of an Apollo 12 NASA experiment. ALSEP, Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package contained the Apollo 12 science experiments. There is a chance Alan Bean conducted an experiment with apple seeds on board Skylab, although I do not remember one. There were many Skylab experiments and apple seeds could have been part of one of those experiments. That fact could be verified using the Skylab II mission documentation. Amy Bean