Pomiferous: The most extensive apples (pommes) database
pomiferous.com121 points by Ariarule 17 hours ago
121 points by Ariarule 17 hours ago
There are dozens of us!
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/
Nice database (got a brief glimpse before it was hugged to death). Personally, I’ve always really liked this apple rating site (no affiliation):
Specialty Produce is also great to check out for produce nerds. They have an app where people can report sightings of specialty produce at local produce markets, farmers markets, grocery stores, etc
https://www.specialtyproduce.com/
(also no affiliation)
This is hilarious thank you.
I used to work for some growers on various bits of custom systems and some of those fruit names were their big sellers.
Some of these are a moving target.
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-honeycrisp-apples-went-from-...
This explains why I can't get a decent Honeycrisp anymore. They used to be seasonal but the ones we get in Washington are not good anymore. Usually you get 3 or 4 varieties of which one is Honeycrisp, one is Cosmic Crisp, and one is Granny Smith. Recently the Cosmic Crisps have been good, but you have to look for a skin that is as red as a Red Delicious and a flame that is yellow or white but never green.
I find the color criteria for Cosmic Crisps seems to work for Honeycrisps too. But good Cosmics are more consistently available.
Yeah, consumers and growers are silly in their own ways which lead to this.
Consumers want the same fruit all year round even though growing fruit(or any plant/vegetable) is very region & season specific.
Growers are big cargo cultists when they see a particular crop getting attention they all rush in. The past 5 years has seen record planting of avocado crops in Australia that now the growers either rip them out or have to sell the farm.
Just enjoy a delicious tasty snack in the appropriate season, and if it’s not on the shelf when you go to the shop then find another in season delicious tasty snack.
Meh. Boom and bust cycles are common in most agricultural industries. Avocados are no different. In fact the industry in Australia seems to have already rebounded
I think it's region dependent and how they travel. A store near me has "organic" ones that are huge and can be 1+ lbs and are very sweet, crisp, and juicy. Then I've seen big box stores selling them by the bag and they're hit or miss but sometimes terrible.
I don't think those factors are left to chance with an apple like Honeycrisp that had a 20-year rollout plan. (or whichever the new hotness is, Cosmic Crisp? I'm partial to Pink Lady.)
Rather, think about all the apples picked that don't meet grocery-store grading. One little bird peck and you're applesauce... ok maybe not exactly.
But the biggest (most vapid) apples go to the store aisle and the little ones (for whatever reason) go to Snack Bags. By the time you see 'em, apples have been graded and picked over to maximize sticker price.
Oddly, for a small grower, the fruits which don't make the cash-crop fresh-eatin' apple cut, might become higher-margin products like cider, jam, pie filling.
It's REALLY hard as an amateur to grow a grocery-store-perfect apple. (I made a lot of applesauce and canned pie filling.)
Blanket apple ratings are silly. You need ratings for apple on hand, baking apple, pig apples, etc.
Pig apple? Is that bad apples that are fed to pigs? Why would you need to rate those? Aren't they just, by definition, lowly rated apples?
maybe it's the apple you use in the pig roast?
the apples that are so far gone with worm/larva frass I called "deer apples". Because I could make a pile and the deer would take them. I've also seen deer "climb" trees to get apples.
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.
It’s refreshing to see a site that’s just a database without five popups asking for a newsletter subscription. Just pure, unadulterated pomology
> Just pure, unadulterated pomology
The site is caught in something of a bind as to its name. "Pomiferous" isn't correctly formed; it means "fruit-bearing", because Latin pomum refers to all fruit equally.
The word for an apple is malum. But in an English-speaking context, that will tend to confuse people over similarity to the word for evil, which is... malum [compare "malevolent"]. (In Latin, the word for "apple" has a long A, while the word for "evil" has a short A, but this is not a distinction we can draw in English.)
-logy is a Greek-derived suffix and you'd want a Greek root. For apples, the ancient Greek word appears to be "melon", so your word would be "melology".
I'll have the pure unadulterated philology, please!
I hear 'pom' as coming to English through French, so that works for me.
Now technically "pome fruit" is the fruits from Rosaceae that encase the multiple seeds, so maybe that site ought to cover Pears, too?
(my Swiss-method apple manual did cover pears.)
I first looked up -ferous (to hand: Eric Partridge, Origins) and noticed the Latin root fer (ferent) is cognate to English 'bear'?
Next, a web site for Belgian Fries enthusiasts: "pommesfritefer.us"!
Seriously, thanks for your comment.
> I first looked up -ferous (to hand: Eric Partridge, Origins) and noticed the Latin root fer (ferent) is cognate to English 'bear'?
Yes, we have fer ⟷ bear just like we have frater ⟷ brother.
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?
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.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
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
I remember I used to regularly seek out varieties and look them up on https://www.orangepippin.com/. I wonder how this database compares!
pomiferous looks like a labor of love. Labor is finite.
I use this site for many years: https://www.orangepippin.com
Ha! I very recently started something for peppers (Capsicum) https://pepperrank.com/
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've seen some similar sites
https://pepperscale.com/hot-pepper-list/
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.
I've learned in the course of making this site, that pretty much all information about peppers is garbage. That's half the reason I wanted to start this.
How expensive is testing now? It looks like the standard method is HPLC analysis of capsaicinoids. I found old forum posts from about 10 years ago indicating $50-$65 per test from providers including SBL, which doesn't sound bad, but I don't know if prices have gone up recently.
Part of the issue is that there's a massive variety between peppers, and genetic diversity is incredibly wide, making it nearly impossible to determine the exact type of pepper you have. There are a few different universities and governments that "certify" peppers, but they aren't connected in any way.
That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking about testing a particular pepper you have for chemical content, but genetic testing and mapping results to pepper type names does sound more complicated/expensive.
Why are you making my screen look dirty? lol
lol I kind of thought it made it look like a hot sauce label. but maybe not.
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 read that wrong at first.
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.
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.
500 error. Hope it comes back online soon, I really want to see this one!