P.S. I think this apple's *perfect* right to the core 🍏
Celebrating fall, new hobbies to try, and what to watch/cook/listen to!
Welcome to today’s issue of PS, my monthly roundup newsletter where I share all my faves from the past month.
I pack P.S. to the brim and use headings to optimize skim-ability. If you’re short on time today, the key below can help you jump around:
🍎 Fall-Maxing and Making the Most of Apple Season
🎨New Hobbies + Activities to Try
🎧 Worth the Listen
📺 Worth the Watch
👩🏾🍳What to Cook this Week
🍎 Fall-Maxing and Making the Most of Apple Season
Quite intentionally, on my part, October was all about leaning into the season. And with that, the month quickly became all about one fruit – the humble and ever-evolving apple. Growing up, I didn’t actually care that much about apples. Occasionally, I would crunch my way through a granny smith, but with a limited perspective on what an apple is (read: red delicious in every lunch room), I kinda wrote the fruit off entirely.
Fast forward to adulthood, and gradual exposure to new varieties has revolutionized my opinions. For the past two falls, Andrew and I have trekked out to Fall Harvest Orchard, where we can pick our own apples and take a tractor tour. The farmer leading the ride told us that while Minnesota is not in the top 10 apple exporters in the country, we are still renowned for the quality of the apples grown here. And that’s largely thanks to the University of Minnesota, which houses one of only three fruit breeding programs in the country. Since its start in 1878, they’ve released 29 unique apple varieties, including the immensely popular (and extremely delicious) Honeycrisp!
Now, 29 varieties in nearly 150 years may not seem like a lot, but that’s because the U has taste, honey. 👩🏽🍳
Here’s what the University says about their process:
Researchers identify “parent” apples with characteristics they’d like to combine. For example, one parent may be disease resistant but not crisp and the other parent may be crisp but not disease resistant. The parents are crossed with the goal of developing a new cultivar that is both disease resistant and crisp. It’s a multiyear process that involves cross-pollination and planting new seedlings.
The real evaluation begins when the trees bear fruit. Researchers taste the fruit of each tree—up to 600 apples per day—and decide if each one is worth keeping around or not. Very few of the thousands of apples that get tasted each growing season make it past the first round of tasting; typically only 10 to 12 each year.
Eating 600 apples a day??? Truthfully, that sounds torturous (if not impossible). On top of that, only about one in every 10,000 trees from the initial breeding process actually makes the cut to be named and sold. And that process from development to public release? It takes about 20 to 25 YEARS.
But it does produce great results. The University of Minnesota released its first apple variety, the Haralson, in 1922. And while the Haralson is still in rotation, it was the 1991 release of the Honeycrisp that really shook things up. But this apple almost never even made its way to market!
As the Los Angeles Times explains:
The Honeycrisp wasn’t an immediate success. The original tree, known officially as MN1711, was discarded in 1977 over concerns about its winter hardiness. But [David] Bedford, [one of the original breeders] who joined the team in 1979, found four small clones that had miraculously escaped the garbage and decided to see if they’d yield fruit. “In 1983,” Bedford wrote in an email, “those small trees bore a few amazing fruit and the rest is history.”
Now, Minnesota alone produces more than 40 million Honeycrisp apples every year. The apple is the fifth-most-grown variety in the United States! Not only that, but the Honeycrisp is the parent of many new apple varieties.
Just ask University of Minnesota professor James Luby:
“I think what we're going to see as part of the great legacy of Honeycrisp is that a lot of the new varieties that are now coming out and coming to your supermarket are actually the children of Honeycrisp[...] It's been used a lot in breeding programs, not only here in the United States, but in Europe and China as well.”
Among those children is the new Triumph® apple, so named for its “triumph” over apple scab, a common fungal disease plaguing Minnesota trees. The child of the Honeycrisp and the Liberty, the tree spent more than 30 years in research and development, first becoming available to growers in 2021. Kudos® is an even newer release, and Andrew and I got to try a single apple we bought at the orchard. A child of the Honeycrisp and Zestar!®, Kudos® is sisters with another popular apple, the SweeTango®! It might be a while before Kudos® is widely available, but count me in as an early fan. :)
Now, like most things in nature, I can’t really talk about apple growing without talking about climate change. As winters in Minnesota have become increasingly warmer, parts of the state have changed plant hardiness zones. This means there are now plants that can be grown in areas where it previously wasn’t possible for them to survive, opening up the possibility of cultivating a wider variety of apples than ever before. Obviously, climate change is not a good thing, but it’s interesting to think about how farmers will adapt to these changes.
In closing, I pray to the God of apples for forgiveness. I underestimated just how incredible this fruit really could be (especially when the University of Minnesota is pulling the strings 😉).
🎨New Hobbies + Activities to Try
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🎨New Hobbies + Activities to Try
🎧 Worth the Listen
📺 Worth the Watch
👩🏾🍳What to Cook this Week