Adam's Apples

This medium-sized apple with its cheerful warm red blush is handsome in all the unconventional ways I admire.  It's ribbed and lumpy and has boldly prominent tan lenticels. There are streaks of russet radiating from the crown.

Despite 60° (F) weather, apple buds are dormant on the trees at Hutchins Farm in Concord, Massachusetts, earlier today. As a follow-up to yesterday's substantially revised report , it looks as though the warm weather here has not roused the apple trees from their protective winter sleep. Winter is not done with us yet.

Update: These are peach trees. A fuschia cloud of buds hovers low over Carlson Orchard in Harvard, Massachusetts, earlier today

This week the Wholesale Gods have coughed up two good, and not entirely dissimilar, apples: Kanzi (left) and Koru. They both bear mysterious two-syllable names (trademarks, really) beginning with K and ending with a vowel. It's February and that's what's on the menu today.

RATING THE YEAR'S APPLES I began to rate apples 10 years ago . My goal was to open an alternate "doorway" into my work, which had grown to include 125 apple reviews. It's now my habit to rate the prior year's apples annually, rather than on the fly. I do so at the dead center of winter  (today!), when there is not so much going on here anyway.