Saturday, December 26, 2020

Pecks of Winter Keepers

Bags of apples, from different orchards, sitting on wooden steps

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.

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Gnarly Pippins

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).

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Ortet

Granite plinth topped with carved apple. The visible part of the inscription reads, "This monument marks the site of the first Baldwin apple tree."

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.

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Sweet end

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.