Adam's Apples

This week I have augmented my hoard of apples with two pecks of winter fruit. With some gaps, I expect my supply to take me through to April. The acquisitions are a half peck each of Cripps Pink ("Pink Lady" to you) and Blushing Golden , and a whole peck of GoldRush .

Gnarly Pippins is both website and nom-de-pomme of site author Matt Kaminsky. Kaminsky (aka Pippins) was profiled this past fall in the Boston Globe . He brings an enthusiasm for wild apples in the spirit of  Henry David Thoreau . Kaminsky's layered, meditative prose style also reminds me of apple-blogger Chris's Life of Apples (on hiatus, perhaps permanently).

There are tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Gala trees in the world today.  ¶  They are clones, genetically identical to the first Gala bred in New Zealand and grown from seed nearly 100 years ago. Indeed, they are that tree, in that each is a link in an unbroken chain of living tissue from the mother tree, grafted and regrafted onto countless sets of roots .

This week marked the last of my Baldwins and Ashmead's Kernels. The Ashmead's were in top form this year, the Baldwins not so much but still worthwhile.