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).

Kaminsky makes cider and has two blogs (1) (2). 

He self-published The Wild Apple Forager’s Guide, which was his undergrad thesis at Hampshire College in Massachusetts's Pioneer Valley. Kaminsky lives in the area today.

He's on Instagram and sells scionwood in season and Gnarly merch year round.

All of which makes Kaminsky's ouvre as wild and free-form as the apples that inspire him.

Names and places

A recent blog post rambles across a personal landscape from a survey of the 2020 harvest to a wild apple forest (don't call it an orchard) in Vermont.

Along the way Kaminsky explores a particular interest of mine, the names we give to apple cultivars. These he catalogs as symbols (e.g., Sheepnose), as advertisements (seek-no-further), as memorial (Hauer Pippin), and so forth.

There's not much doing with the trees this time of year, but you can curl up with a good apple blog (or other work of pomology) like Gnarly Pippins's Gnarly Pippins. He's got the wild apple niche sewed up.

I also keep a short list of apple links.

The western half of Massachusetts is a wonderland of apples and a small source of my own fascination with the pomacious fruit.

The experimental orchard for the University of Massachusetts moved to Belchertown in the early 60s. Nonetheless, while a student I lived near the remains of that institution's earlier orchard.

I remember the curious apples and pears quite unlike the ones I'd grown up with.

I wonder if any of that remains? It was just to the south of the housing area called Orchard Hill.

None of the apples shown are wild. From top: Knobbed Russet, Bill's Redflesh, Calville Blanc d'Hiver and an agéd russet.