A Life of Apples

Seems like I spend a lot of time talking about apples here, which is sort of odd, considering that I've actually never worked with them, and I talk much less about some of the crops I have worked with. But part of why apples keep coming up is that they seem to possess a special place in our culture and our history.

During my months away from this site I stumbled across an apple blog, which I read for a bit, planned on posting here, and then promptly forgot about it as work and travel took me away from the Internet. Then today I realized that the "Chris" who commented here the other day is none other than the author of that blog

A Life of Apples

A Life of Apples features a number of profiles of cultivars, all interesting and well done, which is how I found it, but also touches on the historical and mythological aspects of apples, as well as yoga, recipes, and more. A definite addition to the sidebar.

"Florida Grapes" website gone?

I was just clicking through my links, and I found two of them that don't work, which is always a bummer. One of them, Rare Fruit Online, is at least still available through Archive.org (you can find it here) but the Florida Grapes website appears to have disappeared along with AOL's Hometown web service back in October, and isn't archived on Archive.org. Nor does it appear to be in the Google cache. (If you'd like to see it not working yourself, click here).

This is a major sadness for a pedigree junkie like me, because the site was a great source for parent information, particularly the selections from the programs of two of the "Three Bobs", Dunstan and Zehnder.

From my contacts within the grape breeding community, I feel fairly certain that that information is still preserved somewhere out there. But still, it's one thing for information to be available somewhere in some one's notebooks or spreadsheets, and another for it to be one Google search away.

If anybody has the pedigree information from this site, I'd try to put it online somewhere myself.

For now, I'm pulling both links from the sidebar. (As a condolence, I'm adding the Bananas.org forums).

The International Banana Society

A whole bunch of banana posts here lately, so I might as well break out another long forgotten find from the bookmarks:

The International Banana Society

The site is basically just forums, but those forums are big, active, and packed with information and photos. I'm not in a place to really grow bananas (I did have an Abyssinian one in Florida before I moved to California, though) so I can't make use of a lot of it, but it seems like a big bunch of passionate, well-informed people.

I'm enjoying reading about mutant banana sports.

Update: Check it out—it's Big Mike!

The WANATCA Archives

For those of you who don't recognize WANATCA (I didn't, I'll confess), it's the West Australian Nut & Tree Crop Association. For an organization I've never heard of, they've been fairly productive in terms of publications: Yearbooks, their Quadong magazine, and the proceedings of the Ninth Australasian Confernce on Trees and Nut Crops.

WANATCA Yearbooks On-line

They're all in PDFs, and the layout gets a little tiring to read, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. A quick click through turned up a bananas, nuts, litchi, mango, coconut, and a couple of pieces on nuts, including a history of nuts by George Slate, who was fairly well known as a fruit breeder at Cornell. There's an index available, if you're looking for something specific in the yearbooks.

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Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

I just wanted to call your attention to the addition of the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog in the links list off to the side. These guys have a great site, which I read on a very routine basis, and they link to and say nice things about the Fruit Blog, so the least I can do is coax a little traffic their way. Plus they have a cool URL. So I'll forgive them occasionally (okay, often) talking about things other than fruit. I've linked to things there in the past, but I don't think I've ever posted a link to the site at large.

For those of you too painfully lazy or easily confused to make your way all the way over to the right hand side, here's a link for you:

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

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A couple of new links

I know I haven't been terribly prolific around here lately, but here's a few little tidbits to tide you over a while longer.

First, there's Fruit Forum. A friend recommended this site a few weeks ago, and I keep meaning to post it. This is the site of Joan Morgan, a prominent figure in British fruit circles, and author of the book The New Book of Apples and The Book of Apple. In some ways it's a site a bit like this one, but with a little more question and answer going on, and a slightly more activist bent (she's quite active in opposing the movement of the Brogdale apple collection, for example). I also found it vaguely amusing that while here we have the Fruit Blog Forum, her site has the Fruit Forum Blog.


Also, I came across another fruit site with a British bent while Googling a while ago, and was pleasantly surprised: Orange Pippin. A nice set of apple related links, and a large (though not the largest I've seen) collection of variety description, with nice photos of the fruit.

I miss sleep. I remember it was pretty cool.

Anyway, still in the barely staying functional part of the new baby experience. So don't expect too much here for a little bit. But I thought I'd pass on a couple of links:

The Orchard Keeper's Blog
This is a recently initiated blog to discuss the operation of Royal Oak Farm, an impressively diverse fruit operation in northern Illinois. There might be a tad too much religion for some, and I'm sure some folks will find it incredibly dull, but I think some people may find a window into the nitty-gritty operations of a working orchard to be rather fascinating.

TreeDazzled
TreeDazzled is really a tree site (and he/she seems to be particularly into conifers), not a fruit site, but it's a nice one, and there are plenty of tree fruits. There actually seems to be a fair bit of just general horticulture, with a good mix of academics, links, and forums.