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I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre WWII. We're in the PNW so we also have catalogs of where they were sold to make their way to us, etc, as we identify trees in old orchards.
I've learned some interesting stuff along the way, like that English varieties keep showing up in eastern Washington because English nurseries shipped to Vancouver in the late 1800s.
A lot of fruits seem to have their varietal information flattened out by the time they get to market (i.e. a yellow peach is just a peach yet there are many kinds of yellow peaches).
Apples have not, and I think that's great.
Is this because other fruit varietals are generally not significantly different? Is there some special sauce behind apple distribution?
Something interesting about Apple distribution that i learned recently is that apples are harvested and then stored in atmospheric controlled rooms which causes ripening to stop. This allows apples to be stored for months after harvest and before distribution, which gives us year-around access to apples
That storage technique is decades old and well-known, but it doesn't really explain why apple varietals stayed distinct at market. Peaches get controlled-atmosphere storage too. The real differentiator is probably that apple trees are long-lived investments, so orchardists have more incentive to brand specific cultivars.
In a saucepan, boil 2 c. brown sugar, 1 can condensed milk, corn syrup, 2 sticks butter. Stir constantly, cooking 25 min to firm-ball stage. Dip apples in caramel.
Granny Smith's dominance in caramel apples isn't arbitrary - the acidity cuts through the sugar and the flesh stays firm through the dip. Most heritage varieties I've tried turn mealy or collapse. Though I'd love to run this recipe against some of the database's more obscure tart cultivars.
Very cool site, but I'd love some info pages describing the various categories (harvest period, pollination group, etc.).
I wonder if there is a way to report issues. We have several apple trees of different varieties, and as I was playing around with the harvest period calculator, I entered the peak harvest of one of our later ripening varieties, and asked it to calculate the harvest time for our earliest ripening variety. It told me that peak harvest would be in December. It's actually (as the description for the variety notes) in June/July. So either there is an issue in the harvest period for that variety, or else the calculator is messing up somehow.
I love these niche sites! my friend recently started this for Tinned Fish (absolutely and solely for the love of the fish and with no plans to monetize.) He loves that a few random people will rank hundreds of tins. http://tinventory.co/
I feel like I remember using another one much more similar to your site a while back but I can't seem to find it. But pepperscale is really cool and has individual profiles for cultivars
Data quality on Scoville is unfortunately garbage; Testing is expensive and both individual plants and individual growers/fields are highly variable, so nearly everyone is playing 'telephone' making subjective claims in relation to "known" standard varieties which are also usually subjective claims.
"Slightly hotter than a Jalapeno" means very little when a Jalapeno is anywhere from 3,000 scoville to 60,000 scoville.
Nice, how's the data sourcing going? With peppers the tricky part is always heat ratings varying wildly by grower. Do you let users submit varieties or are you curating manually? We tried user submissions on a similar project and the spam cleanup was a real time sink.
Let me take a moment to say: Try an Envy. Apples are my go-to snack over the last decade, and Envy has been my go-to for the last 3-4 years. They are consistently crisp, readily available, have a complex sweet taste, and even after sitting on the counter for a week tend towards crisp rather than mealy. I've had a few duds, but over 500+ the number of meh ones I've run across is just barely out of the single digits.
anybody in southern VT and wants to check on a rare variety (last of its kind) apple tree? i know exactly where it was. this was a while ago, and it was already old, but who knows.
I don't understand why the west is so focused on apples. There are thousands of fruits and people just stick to apples, bananas, oranges and grapes. They're not bad, but, like, it's like going to a restaurant and ordering sausage every time.
Maybe it's because of logistics. At least from an European point of view.
All of those you mentioned can be grown in Europe, except bananas that are shipped from South America and arrive in good condition despite the long travel. Many other tropical fruits may be too fragile or expensive to transport at scale.
I remember reading an article about banana import and it's a surprisingly complex process involving a lot of R&D to get to where we are today.
Supposing you're right, I can think of some reasons:
apples have spread from Kazakhstan in their thousands of varieties adapted to climates from cool to frigid (the original liked the slopes of a breezy river valley.)
So since the colonies in North America, you could easily have an apple grove. If you were fancy, you bought imported cultivars from Stark Bros, see Thos Jefferson.
In the United States, the #1 beverage until Coca-Cola was apple cider. Lots of factors there.
It's kinda like saying "why is France so focused on wine?" Or California! But if you go to California, it's apricots, almonds, peaches plums pears persimmon blackberry blueberry boysenberry which have all got shorter shelf-life and season.
Reminds me of what USDA ARS was doing with GRIN back in the 90s. Pomology databases aren't new, but keeping them maintained and public-facing is the hard part. Most rot behind institutional firewalls within a decade.
I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre WWII. We're in the PNW so we also have catalogs of where they were sold to make their way to us, etc, as we identify trees in old orchards.
I've learned some interesting stuff along the way, like that English varieties keep showing up in eastern Washington because English nurseries shipped to Vancouver in the late 1800s.
Our apple database is here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/