Tea for Tuesday - Apples

This is a sugar and creamer set made by Otagiri in the 1950s.   I picked it up earlier this year at a thrift store.  I don't have a teapot to go with them, although I do have some apple facts...

  Apples don't come true from seed.  If you like apples made by a particular tree, and you want more of them, you have to clone the tree by grafting a cutting of it onto another rootstock.

Every McIntosh apple is a graft of the original tree (or a graft of its offspring) that John McIntosh found on his Ontario farm in 1911.

Likewise, every Granny Smith apple is a graft of the tree (or again, a graft of its offspring) that Maria Ann Smith found in the mid-1800s in her Australian compost pile.

In the mid-1800s there were thousands of unique varieties of apples in the United States.  Industrial agriculture reduced that to a handful of varieties that got promoted worldwide.   The top five sellers in the U.S. are Red Delicious, Gala, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, and Fuji.

New varieties are being developed, but they are strictly controlled.  Growers sign a contract that stipulates how the trees will be grown and where they'll be sold.  In addition, the growers need to pay annual royalties on every apple.

 

Luckily, even when abandoned, an apple tree can live more than 200 years.  

This means that many of the old varieties may be commercially, but not quite yet biologically, extinct. 

I bought this assortment of apples this weekend.  I picked apples I never heard of before.  

Maybe you'd like to branch out and try a new one, too.  It's a good way to keep us from losing our produce vocabulary.  I kind of wonder about that every time a young cashier asks me whether she's weighing lettuce or cabbage.  I suppose I should be glad that she knows the names, even if she can't tell them apart.