Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples | Hacker News Reader

Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples

atlasobscura.com

116 pointspolitelemon48 comments

I bought a house with apple trees last year. One of them makes little red apples where the color of the flesh has red streaks, like someone dripped stain on to it or something.

They're _wonderful_. The closest I can describe it (and my wife agrees) is that it's like if watermelon jolly rancher actually was a natural flavour. But if you wait more than a day or two after picking they're not particularly good at all.

Maybe a John Gidley's Pearmain? ( https://www.fruitid.com/#view/1012 ) - but really don't know. Fruitid is great for fruit identification.

Grow an apple tree (several, actually, to pollinate each other) is what I'm saying I guess.

It may be a type of Redlove apple. The smallest ones are called Redlove Lollipop

That flavor reminds me eating fresh snake fruit in Indonesia. It’s like an Apple that takes tastes like a strawberry (snake fruit has nothing to do with apples, just the texture of its flesh is similar).

Discovery apples look like that:

https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/discovery

https://www.quickcrop.co.uk/product/discovery-apple-trees

My dad has a small tree of them. I don't recognise the watermelon flavour, though - but then i don't think i've ever tried Jolly Ranchers.

You should check Adam's blog and see if they are already there! http://adamapples.blogspot.com/

Thanks! It's hard to pick a type for sure though.

If the trees were grown from seed, it is almost guaranteed that the apple you have is unique, though it may share some characteristics with other varieties. All apple varietals are grafted (cloned) from the original specimen onto other root stock.

It sounds like they don't hold their flavor well, so they're unlikely to be suitable for large-scale commercial cultivation, though apparently there are active communities of apple enthusiasts who would be happy to take cuttings.

This chap's YouTube channel has a good number of videos about growing apples that are less well known:

https://www.youtube.com/user/1sustainablehedonist/videos

If you're based in the the UK, the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale grow quite a few different varieties of apple seedlings (and other fruits) and has a reasonable sized seed stock I think you can order from.

https://brogdaleonline.co.uk/

http://www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/index.php

For what its worth these are unlikely to be from seed, as apples are very unlikely to produce fruit which matches the variety of the parent.

You're right, what's for sale are are rootstock trees. But I believe you can get access to seed stock as well.

Apples trees grown from seed actually do not match their parent - they are a genetic mix (just like us). What's more, they will most likely bear fruit that isn't pleasant to eat.

All the apple varieties you eat have been cultivated from a single original specimen, via cuttings or (more likely) grafting onto a convenient root stock.

So does that mean if you only have the seeds available you've effectively lost that variety? i.e. it's now extinct?

I feel this warrants more research for me.

Yes, essentially, if it hasn't otherwise been propagated. Also, the process for creating a new edible variety is fairly time and resource intensive, since it involves planting a lot of seeds and waiting a couple years to see if you get something worthwhile.

The story is also similar for rootstock. Apples are naturally a fairly large tree, which isn't convenient for harvesting. The rootstocks that apples are typically grafted onto are genetic variants that don't grow as large.

Thanks for the education :)

Used to live in the middle of town. On a walk with the kids, down 3 blocks and left at the little market onto a dead-end street, at the end was a little hayfield with a pond and an apple tree.

The apples on this tree were like cannon-balls. Someone had stacked the fallen ones this way, in little tetrahedral piles of 4. Bigger - not quite soccer balls but impractically, ludicrously large dark apples. Never heard of them, never seen them pictured anywhere.

The tree is gone now, the entire meadow and pond turned into condominiums.

One of the weird things about apples is that every seed contains very different DNA than whatever it came from.

It sounds like that was just a random variation that someone planted. Did the apples taste any good? If they had, you might have been able to sell them. It's very possible that particular variety of apple will never exist again.

How are varieties consistently reproduced then? Cuttings/grafting?

I think most apple varieties intended for mass orchard production are clone cuttings grafted onto dwarfing rootstock. The clone produces consistent fruit, and the dwarfing rootstock produces easily harvested trees.

How is this unique to Apples? Most fruit trees come from clones. If you buy local the clones will be grafted onto a rootstock that matches your zone. A lot of vegetable seeds are unlikely to produce identical plants from seeds, especially if you have multiple squashes. Hass avocados are clones from the original tress a farmer found in the early 1900s.

Yeah in our garden we plant chili peppers, Anaheim, jalapeno etc. Tried replanting seeds one year, and while the fruit looked (mostly) like the parent plant, the heat was all over the map. It was chili roulette!

I had a few Franken-squash take over my garden one year. They even seeded themselves. The place I order seeds from will even warn you if the peppers can be cross pollinated easily.

Yeah...I've had some really odd 'volunteers' come up the year after planting mixes of squashes. Melons are are apparently notorious for crossing as well.

According to a professional pepper farming acquaintance, if you do this for a couple of generations, the heat mostly disappears and the taste becomes bland. They go to some lengths to prevent cross-pollination.

So sad to hear it's gone. There might have been some interest in propagating it, if for no other reason than cross breeding.

Curious about the taste.

Wolf River apples can be very large, but they're not dark, at least not the ones I've seen.

Braddick's Non-pareil

That's my favourite apple ever, and I may well have tasted it from one of the only two trees remaining -- at Faversham, Kent, UK.

Quite possibly I got them on a really good day, or they just spoke to my taste buds.

Either way there's a few thousand apple varieties we know about, yet most people have tried a few dozen. Similarly cherries, and pears.

They don't have to look great (TFA images look spectacular) to taste great -- the Braddock is visually unassuming and unappealing

I live in Sweden which has an abundance of apples. All year round there are only two or three Apple varieties in the stores: Royal Gala, Golden, Pink Lady. Same goes for pears.

Where are the rest of Apple varieties? No one knows.

Well, some people do [1] Profits, economics, transportation.

[1] https://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/where-have-all-apples-gon...

> Where are the rest of Apple varieties? No one knows.

From the article:

Due to the demands of industrial farming, only a handful of apple varieties make it to stores, and even of those, only the most uniform specimens sit on the shelves. Growers have abandoned many delicious or beautiful varieties that have delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease.

Then there's the wholesale destruction of old and disease free orchards which has seen the availability of once popular cultivars vanish. It's a crime really.

> delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease

All of these are very valid reasons to not try to mass produce them. Even if they would be available from some person's orchard, they would still not be available in the shops or markets.

They could be available from local growers during apple season, but they aren't suitable for year round distribution from a central location.

Strawberries are noticeably different even at the grocery stores in the summer in New England.

It was all lead by the supermarkets, in the UK at least.

The two or three favourite varieties in the seventies and eighties have all disappeared. Not because customers no longer like them, but because the supermarkets wanted high yield, large size, taste free apples. More profit, and vast suppliers who'd supply a trillion tonnes at a time.

In the space of a decade the entire stock of trees for the UK's number one and two were grubbed up. The customers still wanted them, still asked for them, the supermarket response was "fuck you".

Now it's all Royal Gala, Golden Revolting^W Delicious, Pink Lady, Braeburn. All bland balls of taste free sugar.

> The customers still wanted them, still asked for them, the supermarket response was "fuck you".

There was no other place people could have purchased them?

> Golden Revolting^W Delicious

The proper term is "Yellowish Horrible". A completely pointless apple.

Not sure if they do it in the UK, but Tesco, of all places, sometimes sells nice local apples when they're in season in Ireland.

They would be available in local stores at the very least. However, supermarket chains eat everything up and leave no place for local stores. Even when a supermarket location has deals with local farmers (e.g. for eggs), it will not carry non-lasting products such as apples.

Depends where you live. Where I live in New England there are lots of local orchards and supermarkets carry maybe a dozen varieties. Probably more than the farm stands actually because some varieties like Granny Smiths are mostly not grown locally.

Of corse where I live is pretty much apple orchard central. My neighbor has an orchard and “Johnny Appleseed” was from the next town over.

> Depends where you live.

True. Local stores are nearly non-existent in Sweden. Even the smallest ones belong to a supermarket chain.

This. This holidays I've visited a friend and they have a shop that just sells apples from the orchard just next to it. Doesn't solve the availability problem but nothing will.

I agree but there are many varieties that could meet and have met the criteria for public sales, except for current trends in appearance or taste.

It's really remarkable how canalized apple markets have become, when you're exposed to alternatives. The fads become somewhat self perpetuating because they shift context of perception (people judge based on what they know).

It's not so much currently popular apples are bad, just that there's lots more out there.

With apples too you have the interesting case of the cider market, hard and soft. You can kind of get a sense of the effects of fads because cider apples can be really different in appearance but otherwise meet other marketability criteria. You end up with different sets of apples, which speaks to what people like when appearance isn't an issue.

I acknowledge texture is an issue in eating vs drinking, and that cider apples are blended for their charactistics, but many are also varieties that used to be popular eating or cooking apples that drifted in popularity but are still used in cideries because they've stood the test of time and customers like the flavor.

In the UK many or most of the less common apple varieties are used to make cider, not for eating. Cider apples are usually smaller and less sweet. And you don’t have to deal with shelf life issues with fresh apples.

The temperate orchard conservancy is an awesome non-profit, preserving many rare varieties and distributing scions for grafting onto rootstock.

They only take orders from December through January (i.e. until the end of this month).

http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org/

One correction, Al Bean took the seeds to the moon, not around them.

I can forgive Atlas Obscura for it, however, since the USDA page(1) has it wrong as well...which severely irks me as it's a government website. It says "carried around the moon in the early 1970's by Astronaut Bean on Apollo 13 Flight."

Al bean was on Apollo 12, which was in the 1960's, and he walked on the surface. I submitted a ticket to the site linked in (1) to correct it.

1: https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx...

It now says:

Supposedly, seeds were carried by Alan Bean on Apollo 12 (no citation provided).

Do you have a citation for this?

I do not. I've been emailing back and forth with the USDA folks and none of us have been able to find any reference to the seeds outside of the Atlas Obscura article. The only special thing I can find information on Bean taking up was a camera timer.

They said they'll keep looking to see if they can find anything. I'm curious to know where the author of the book got this information.

I also read this Atlas Obscura article-Alan Bean did not carry apple seeds to the moon. All Astronauts have a list of what they personally took on the mission (flags, jewelry, military insignia). Apple seeds was not part of Alan Bean's list. In addition I am unaware of any apple seeds carried as part of an Apollo 12 NASA experiment. ALSEP, Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package contained the Apollo 12 science experiments. There is a chance Alan Bean conducted an experiment with apple seeds on board Skylab, although I do not remember one. There were many Skylab experiments and apple seeds could have been part of one of those experiments. That fact could be verified using the Skylab II mission documentation. Amy Bean

I assume this was written in response to the gentleman whose hobby was collecting heritage apples (and moonshine stories) in the quite amazing photo -

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eiyy2u/t...

I never thought apples could be so different... I understand the black swan feeling a lot more now...

What's even more interesting is that the fact that we don't see these is a consequence of the economics surrounding apples, drive by what people perceive and as such want an apple to be.

If you like in-depth apple reviews, I highly recommend Adam's Apples: http://adamapples.blogspot.com/

It's especially fun to learn the jargon (lenticels, calyx, etc).

From what I’ve heard from people who’ve travelled, apples from the Pamir mountains area are closest to wild apples and have some great varieties with great flavor.

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