Adam's Apples

We all know that apples are from Kazakhstan . But today, gene resequencing techniques are telling us more about the long voyage of the apple from the wilds of the Tien Shen mountains to the U-Pick orchard. In particular, the modern European-style apple is a cross between the original Kazakh apple, Malus sieversii, and the European crab apple, M. sylvestris.

Robots are battling for dominance of the orchard. Check out this fruit-picking robot under development by an Israeli company. Details are sketchy, but a promotional video shows two listless, sweaty apple pickers who are delighted to welcome their robotic overlord, which we are told can pick ten times as fast as humans. Meanwhile, the sound track and the lighting changes and a robotic arm deftly harvests the apples.

Although this word is sometimes just a synonym for apple, especially one that is green and tart, pippin's pomological meaning is an apple grown from seed. Not grafted. Wild, even (It also is slang for a person or thing that is exemplary, a corker, a right good one. Another meaning is just a pip, a seed.) In its apple sense pippin is the opposite of the word cultivar, a plant variety developed and propagated via human cultivation. Simple enough, if you don't look too closely. But think about it and your brain will itch. Because those pippins we know and love? They are all propagated by grafting.

Researchers at Purdue university have discovered a giant Gala, a sport of the variety that is 15% larger than normal. The fruits, dubbed Grand Gala by Peter Hirst and Anish Malladi, weigh 38% more. As reported in Science Daily, Larger apples tend to have more cells than their smaller counterparts, so Hirst theorized that there was a gene or genes that kept cell division turned on in Grand Gala. Instead, he found that Grand Gala had about the same number of cells as a regular Gala, but those cells were larger. Maladi and Hirst's original research, published in last month's Journal of Experimental Botany, is available online, at least temporarily. This has nothing to do with the menacing reports of Honeycrisps as big as small pumpkins in the Boston Globe last year. Hirst predicted that Grand Galas would not be developed commercially because they are "slightly lopsided." Too bad, I'd like to try one.

Plant a seed from your favorite apple and you will eventually grow...something else. Apples are extremely heterozygous and do not breed true. Instead apple trees are propagated by grafting—by stitching together a cutting of the desired fruit onto a living stump. (Kevin Hauser has this short video detailing one such grafting technique.) Farmers and nurseries once used any old apple seedling for rootstock, but today they usually choose from rootstocks that cause the tree to bear quickly and/or for size (that is, to grow the grafted variety on dwarf or semidwarf trees). These rootstocks are similarly propagated asexually from clippings : usually some variation of sticking live rootstock clippings into dirt or other medium until they root. (Update : Kevin Hauser also documents that process on video.) Consequently your favorite apple probably grew on a single tree comprising not one but two clones. Incidentally, "Rootstock...

Matt Gunderson, writing in last week's Boston Globe, describes an experiment in high-density apple farming at Shelburne Farm and ten other orchards in Massachusetts. According to the UMass Extension Program , this technique entails using dwarf rootstock and training, rather than pruning, to direct tree vigor into the production of fruit rather than wood. Trees are small and close together, and very high yielding; furthermore they produce earlier, and yield larger fruit. Gunderson describes, for example, a 1.5-pound honey crisp specimen - the size of a small pumpkin - from the new orchard. Acromegalic Honeycrisps? I admit to mixed feelings about that. But I am glad to see apple journalism in my newspaper, and this seems to be the season: the Globe also published a recipe for apple cider sorbet. Yum!