Three for lazy days of summer

In spring and summer this seasonal blog slows down. I think of apples often, but not all thoughts are worth sharing. ¶ 

You might nonetheless enjoy one or all of these three summer reflections while you wait on the harvest.

Supply chain woes

Once upon a time the spring assortment of supermarket apples would be refreshed by fruit from the southern hemisphere.

It's been a few years without that spring rescue. Domestic apples suffer in June.

I've never had a mealy Jazz, but this week I found one that was getting there, unfortunately.

Jazz

There is a specialty market near me (not the one you think) that has Lemonades from New Zealand.

Lemonade

These are not a top favorite but their excellent breaking-crisp texture reminds me of what we've been missing.

Things to come

Meanwhile in England, Karim Habibi's "side gig" is breeding tomorrow's apples. Karim runs Keeper's Nursery in Kent. He has a new tour of his breeding project up on YouTube:

In contrast to massive breeding operations that hope to outdo Honeycrisp and dominate supermarkets worldwide, Karim this year has achieved not thousands of crosses but 94, from which he expects to glean "maybe 1,500 seeds."

Karim says "it's actually relatively easy to breed apples, maybe not for commercial purposes, but for the next generation of garden orchard varieties."

More new apples

Karim is not the first to go that route. In California, Stephen Edholm has been breeding new varieties for, gosh, a decade? More?

He also preaches the gospel of "you do not need to grow 10k trees." Lately, he has been developing red-fleshed varieties.

Stephen, a Paleolithic renaissance man, has a considerable youtube library on many topics. Here is a segment in which he tastes his favorite russet for the first time in years:

We've got about a month to go before we see fresh local apples here.

Summer seal courtesy of Johnathon Keller