Rain returned to the farm. It’s a good pattern, especially if it keeps up. The ponds are filling albeit slowly. Rain brings me indoors, and indoors means apple identifications. I have bags and boxes and more bags and more boxes of apples awaiting names. They’re coming in like the tide and piling up like driftwood on the shore.
For decades doing apple ID’s in the fall and winter has been almost entirely a solo act. Everyone else in the world is at work or off doing something at least marginally more productive. Not me. I’m attempting to put a name on an apple. As far as the apple is concerned, it has no name and never did have one. I open a bag and gently pour the apples out onto the table, set them up like bowling pins or maybe cocktail glasses and stare at them. If I’m lucky, I know the apple. Voila. Northern Spy. Next bag please.
This year I’m trying a two-person version of the ID process. Skylar is helping. Although she’s excited about spending hours staring at apple after apple after apple, she has a lot to learn. Even using a searchable key—which we have—you have to know where to jump in with each new apple. It’s a challenge. It takes time and a certain kind of experience, the kind that opens the doors of possibilities. So Skylar and I tag team. I have a hunch and pass the apples to her to research variety X or Y. Today it worked quite well.
Paradise!
The internet, by the way, is useless. AI seems to butt into all inquiries and messages without being asked, and it is hellbent on identifying apples as “Paradise.” Whenever someone asks me about their “Paradise” apples, I know they’ve been dealing with the devil, the devil being the internet who does not know how to ID apples…yet. It looks at your apple which can be red, yellow, russet, large, small or just about anything else and declares: Paradise. (Spending your life with apples and orchards is paradise so I guess AI isn’t entirely wrong.)