Kind of related: in former Eastern Germany they bred all kinds of new Pear varieties.
Pears are a little more finicky than apples and the fruit bruise more easily. Furthermore a lot of the varieties will go bad really quickly, so you basically have to eat them from the tree.
Because of those reasons there are just one or two varieties available in stores and there is not a lot of commercial interest in Pears. With the end of the GDR, also came the end of Pear breeding and there are barely any new breeds in the last 30 years.
To end on an Apple related note: my favorite GDR breed is the „Schweizer Orange“, „Swiss Orange“. Which is so ironic because there was no access to Switzerland nor good Oranges.
Serendipitous seeing this mentioned here after my father very recently mentioned how much he missed the variety of pears that he could get when he went on komandirovkas to the GDR.
I don't understand "komandirovkas" in this context. Was he a Warsaw pact or Soviet intelligence agent working in the GDR? Or was he West German but traveled to East Germany for one reason or another?
Interesting, thanks for the information especially on Eastern Germany. I'm not super familiar with many apple/pear varieties but worked as quality control for a pear packaging factory for a summer. The fruit are basically picked hard and processed/packaged the same day. The most common defects are punctures from the short stems and then maybe bruising. I think most defective pears are then used for canning or similar products.
They do ripen really quick and turn from hard green to yellow/brown in a few days. A perfect pear is so good..
Fascinating! I went to look for more information about this, and didn't find anything at all, but did find this charming and interesting piece about German pear varieties from long before the descent of the Iron Curtain:
Ah yeah, there are still cultivars of the old breeds, but the problem is that without new breeds being created, we are not combatting the challenges of climate change and diseases changing.
As you seem to know something about this, what's an apple/pear hybrid like? I assume they do hybridise. How about pear/quince? That should be an interesting one.
There are some apple-pear hybrids that produce fruit. Development work seems ongoing in Germany. Unfortunately for me as (mostly) an English speaker, most of the papers describing it are in German. Here's a summary of an abstract in English, though: https://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US2014.... If you search for the primary author plus some keywords (Thilo Fischer Apfel Birne) you can find articles that give more details.
I'm guessing the Sorbopyrus you are describing is the Shipova: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipova. It's a surprisingly old hybrid. I've got one growing, but haven't gotten any fruit yet. Have you eaten it?
If you can, try comice. A diva to culture, but the fruit is fantastic.
Pears are not the easiest fruit to culture and in some areas is a doomed project from the start. --Don't-- buy trees in the supermarket without a sanitary tag. Go to a professional. Fireblight is a real pain
apple and pear don't hybridize. They don't even can be grafted one in the other. The tissues are rejected. There are round species of pears naturally shaped as an apple but they are not "pears" (common pears) neither apples. Are from Japan and are called nashis or sand pears. Tasty and crunchy, very good in salads
Pear and quince can hybridize producing a fruit called Pyronia (= Pyrus x Cydonia). Is not better than any of the parents, so it remains basically unknown and unavailable.
I recently caught an apple-centric episode of 'Gastropod' and definitely recommend it. [1]
I like podcasts that have transcripts, and invite you to this moment where a few layers were added to my understanding of well known American figure 'Johnny Appleseed'[2]:
> TWILLEY: Johnny would get a mush of seeds and apple cores thrown out by a cider mill, and he would stick it in a dugout canoe, and tie that to another canoe and then float down the Ohio River to find a promising new patch of land.
> POLLAN: So like a real estate developer, he would make a kind of judgment as to where the next wave of settlement was likely to be. He’d buy or squat on a piece of land and he’d cultivate it and plant his apple trees and they would be ready when the settlers got there. And he would sell them for a couple pennies apiece.
I also like podcasts with transcripts for when there are little segments I'd like to share with people. Sometimes they aren't the tagged segments, when available, but rather just a few lines in the middle.
> I kind of like this version better than the altruistic fantasy.
Same, although to be fair, in this day and age the altruistic version is the more realistic one; it's a lot easier to guerrilla garden some fruit trees than it is to run a commercial nursery. Which is why most of the people who run small independent nurseries do it as a second career, and don't start until their 60s or so.
I have some trees from this place, as well as trees from 'Century Farms' - another meticulously kept apple and pear orchard archive.
Their tasting and usage notes on heirloom apples is worth a read.
Learning how to take care of these trees has been a rewarding journey so far, their status can be so tenuous as you learn about the impacts of cedar tree rust, fire blight, and dozens of bacteria out to quickly ruin the trees!
Used to walk a neighborhood near where we used to live near downtown. Go down a side street, at the end was a hayfield and a pond! In the middle of town.
And by the pond, an apple tree. With apples the size of cannonballs. Big as your head. Somebody would stack the ones that fell into tripods. It was surreal.
Anyway the place is developed now, the pond gone, the apple tree just a memory.
There is a strain of Golden Reinette that makes enormous apples, very tasty and great to make applesauce from. A bit on the sour side for many people but I love them.
Yes, they typically are. But there are certain variations that are really large, 15 to 20 cm diameter I've had (and no less tasty for their size, which is pretty rare). It's like a four person meal in one apple :)
They aren't all that popular because they bruise easily and aren't very pretty, dry skin, not glossy, dull colors, mostly yellow, dark green and brown. But I really like them.
I'm here to shout out about russets. Russetting is when the apple skin becomes like sandpaper. It typically becomes "rejected" fruit by shops, its seen as a no-no. But this ignores that russet apples exist as a sub-species, and are enjoyed by British people as an accompaniment to cheese. They are often very fragrent, and can have Nashi-like texture in the flesh.
I find it very odd it's universally regarded as an abnormality, when quite a lot of food speciation is this kind of divergence from the main path.
They're basically unavailable in Australia. I suspect if it occurs in fruit trees here it's rejected at farm gate, and if it occurs in import stocks the quarantine process rejects them.
Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store. The tastiest apples are often smaller, brown or dark skin, not the big red 'juicy' apples the uninformed consumer thinks are the best. Viz. the Red "Delicious", whose flavor was bred out in favor of color and appearance. It is now insipid and flavorless.
In the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, the humble-looking Cox Orange is sweet as candy, with a hint of pear. You can only get it from local suppliers.
"Bred out" is a bit of a misnomer here. Apples varieties are propagated clonally through grafting. However, each new cloned tree originates from a single twig of a previous tree, and that twig originates from a single cell of the donor tree. Since cell division is not a perfect process, point mutations can accumulate over the generations from this process. In the case of Red Delicious, selections of point mutations (known as "sports") for storage life, color, and conical shape have resulted in the uninspiring, insipid thing we call a Red Delicious apple.
I have a tree of the original Delicious apple, which was a seedling found in an orchard near Sumner, Iowa, not far from where I live in NE Iowa. Preservationists have propagated this tree for minimal mutation. It is a slightly larger apple than commercial Red Delicious, ripens green with red blush, very firm, sweet with mild acidity, and moderate storage potential. Not my favorite apple of the 30 or so in my orchard, but one well worth growing.
Where you grow an apple also matters a great deal. Cox Orange Pippen may be great in Nova Scotia, which is not unlike it's Northern England home range, but it's a crappy apple in the mid-South, and can't be ripened reliably at all where I live.
Depends of course on the use to which I'm putting the apple. If I had to reduce to a single variety in the orchard, I'd probably grow Liberty (not an heirloom, but rather a university-bred disease resistant variety created in the 1950s). Great eating fresh off the tree (if, like me, you like a tart, but not overly tannic, crisp eater), makes great dried apples, and decent unfermented juice. I would choose Honeycrisp (an even younger variety) over Liberty, if it weren't so damned hard to grow well. For keepers, I'd go with Black Oxford. For pies, it's hard to beat Beacon or Charlamoff (which is known by at least a dozen different names that are all somehow or other derived from Charlemagne, or Carolingian). I also like Calville Blanc for pies.
> Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store.
I'm not sure it's "ironic". I think it is a case of "you get what you optimize for".
Grocery stores optimize for:
* cost
* transportability
* shelf life
* appearance
And all for good reason! That's what makes money.
Doesn't matter if you have the best tasting apple in the world if shipping it on a truck destroys 90% of them and you can't sell the others before they go off.
To be fair, to someone who was not born in the US and grew up eating apples from u-pick orchards, grocery store apples in CA have an awful apparence and shelf life and way too sugary taste, but this is likely a case of people buying what they are used to :)
Salt Spring Island, BC also seems to have a big heirloom apple thing going on, for any Van folks. (ex: I bought a couple of trees from this orchard https://www.saltspringapplecompany.com/)
Cox's Orange Pippin is indeed a great apple (and perhaps more importantly, a parent to a huge number of delicious and more tractable varieties), but it's hardly brown or dark - it looks like a textbook apple to me:
Cox Orange is a mythical cultivar. In part because the marketing but yep, is known as royalty. Sadly is known also to pick any fungus disease in the list. There are probably best new varieties. As a rule, the better taste a variety, the faster it spoils (unless you cheat).
All "black" apples and red flesh apples are a little acidic. Arkansas black (is not really black) improves after storing it for some months. Not so good to eat directly from the tree.
There are apples to eat from the tree and apples to store for winter. Both groups are desirable to have.
At long as there are wild, native apples growing somewhere, would that be enough genetic diversity to recreate similar varieties to anything that's lost?
Probably, but whether the particular combinations occurred again would be a more complicated matter. They don't breed true, so every new tree is pretty much a random experiment.
(a given variety is propagated by cutting and grafting)
My favorite apple for January is Perpetu "Everest", a crab apple that is small, hard and edible only in the strict sense, but oh, the birds that it attracts in the middle of the winter... Is unique in that sense. Unless the other apple trees, It keeps the fruits from Dec until March when the birds need it most. In your climate the mileage may vary.
For eating, Mingan, Golden or Rubinette are very tasty if picked in their moment, but my favorite apple is any resistant to the most diseases possible. This means a thick skin.
Although I appreciate the work folks like Tom Brown do, the notion that he has actually rescued 1000 varieties is a bit of a stretch. An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it. Otherwise it's just on life support in a museum, and maybe in a few home orchardists' little collections of trees - it's perpetuation still hanging by a thread. In particular, trees grafted, as Brown's are, onto dwarf roootstock, sometimes mutiple varieties per tree, and maintained by an 80 year old retiree, could all be gone again in a decade or two, even if his records are meticulous. Dwarf apple trees don't live long, and a single ice storm or hurricane could kill hundreds of varieties in a single pass.
This is not to dis Tom's work, only to say, the actual rescue is very tenuous.
> An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it.
This is such a sad viewpoint on the world when biodiversity is valued only if it is commercially exploitable. See other threads on what "home in commerce" really means: optimizing for transportability and uniformity at the expense of flavor and nutrition.
Late to the heirloom party, but this summer a friend offered me a cheese and tomato sandwich from her garden. I originally wasn't interested because tomatoes were always kinda meh for me. But after some encouragement I went for it and after the first bite, I realized I just never actually had a truly juicy and flavorful tomato in my life.
When you say something needs to be commercially successful to be viable, be careful what you're optimizing for. Our commercial agriculture systems don't always optimize for the things you're sold in the slick marketing commercials. There's alternative commerce systems out there, but they look like a farmer's market where you might be surprised by a variety you've never tasted before and might have a few blemishes rather than the scale of a national supermarket where both coasts and everyone in between always gets the same consistent but bland red delicious.
> When you say something needs to be commercially successful to be viable, be careful what you're optimizing for.
I'm optimizing for survival. If an apple variety has no market, it won't be eaten or enjoyed (so it becomes at best a museum accession), and in the longer term, it won't be grown, propagated or maintained, and because these things don't live forever, and don't propagate themselves, it will disappear. It doesn't have to have a huge market, it can be regional, or highly specialized; it can even be for nursery trees so people can try to grow it in their back yards. But just like anything that has to be produced (that is, that doesn't just persist on its own), it will disappear if no one is willing to pay for it to be produced.
So, I'm not making a value judgment about commercial vs other, I'm just saying what it takes to keep something alive.
Saving heirloom apples has zero biodiversity value, or near two it. All domestic apples are extremely inbred and from a one or two cultivars brought to Europe a few hundred years back. The reservoir of apple biodiversity , at least for sylvestris is in its native range where domestic apple cultivation is actively polluting the genome. I think that's like khazakhastan and western china.
What you're describing sounds more like "revive" or "sustain". Interesting and important next steps, for sure. Saving a variety from imminent destruction is still a "rescue", though.
That's a fair and good correction. My only point is that they are still extremely vulnerable to extinction, unless there is demand for them in the market.
> Although I appreciate the work folks like Tom Brown do, the notion that he has actually rescued 1000 varieties is a bit of a stretch. An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it.
This was a great article about someone putting in a lot of work to collect and sustain old apple varieties. I didn’t expect to come into the comments and find people gatekeeping the concept of rescuing old apple varieties, especially not on the basis of a lack of consumer demand. He has made these available to others who want them, per the article.
Come on, this guy rescued varieties from extinction. He’s not on a mission to restore their popularity among the general public. Heirloom varieties are fun and rare and unique. Let’s enjoy and appreciate this for what it is.
I think their point is that apple seeds don’t grow true to their parent, so every single sprout from a seed is essentially a new variety, and they are continually created and lost -- the genetic line is not extinct, these are all the same plant. Capturing a large collection of palatable apples is fun, but framing this as some sort of historical preservation is kind of tenuous.
In 1920, there were 23,000 varieties of Apples in the U.S. On U.S.D.A. land, they grow less than 3,500. There are less than 7,600 in the world. The article is misleading. The claim is Mr Brown has rescued more than 1,200 varieties.
The ONLY variety of Apple native to the U.S. is the Crab Apple.
The Crab Apple you refer to is a species, not a variety. And, to be clear, while there were many, many varieties of apples named and propagated in North America in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost all of them were of the same, single species.
Surely there oughta be better fruits to save. As a generic "fruit hunter" I hate all apples and oranges now, it's like there's no other fruit in the world. Go spread the seed of the ice cream bean fruit and tabo fruit instead.
This comment is as silly as saying you shouldn't grow walnuts because there is watermelon. The fruits you mentioned are not even comparable to apples they are tropical fruits and wouldn't even grow in most parts of the United States. Apples from the grocery store are generally lack-luster compared to varieties that have been grown for flavor instead of shelf life.
Apples have many more purposes than eating out of hand, this is why they are the world's most popular fruit. There are cider apples, pie apples and sauce apples. You can also make pectin, jam and apple butter. What else is done with ice cream bean besides just eating it?
Yup, for the first years of so I lived in the US, I never understood why American (hard) cider tastes so different from French cider, even when you get fancy no-sugar added cider.
The answer was that cider is mostly made from table apples instead of cider apples, and they taste completely different!
I've not had French cider, but cider is getting more popular here and there are quite a few styles available. One local cidery has a full range of ciders from sweet to dry and they use a variety of different cider apples. There are even a few cideries that are growing their own seedling apples to use in their cider blends.
I remember reading about someone whose passion (perhaps obsession) was rescuing stray dogs in a big city.
People would often ask him why he didn't apply that energy to the homeless. His response, roughly: why don't you? Dogs are his passion.
Volunteer for the activities you're passionate about. And stop sniping at people who are making the world a better place just because you think you know better than they do what's worth saving.
Pears are a little more finicky than apples and the fruit bruise more easily. Furthermore a lot of the varieties will go bad really quickly, so you basically have to eat them from the tree.
Because of those reasons there are just one or two varieties available in stores and there is not a lot of commercial interest in Pears. With the end of the GDR, also came the end of Pear breeding and there are barely any new breeds in the last 30 years.
To end on an Apple related note: my favorite GDR breed is the „Schweizer Orange“, „Swiss Orange“. Which is so ironic because there was no access to Switzerland nor good Oranges.