Apple facts and fun

Apple science

The science of apple growing is called ‘Pomology’. In Australia this science may easily be confused with the study of a peculiar variety of homo sapiens, better known as the English.

***

How many leaves does it take to grow an apple?

Someone, probably a pomologist, has worked out that is takes the combined energy of 50 photo synthesising leaves to produce an apple.

***

How many apples per acre?

The harvest from a well-managed mature orchard of cider apples averages about 8 tons per acre. (An acre is about 40 x 100 meters. A square acre measures 209 x 209 feet).

***

How many apples on a mature tree?

Apples harvested from an average mature tree in a well-managed orchard can fill 20 boxes, weighing 42 lbs each, which is a total of 840 lbs.

***

A Case for Decimalisation?

Old habits die hard and weights of apples are still often measured in ‘bushels’. In the British Imperial system a bushel is a volume or capacity equal to 2.219.36 cubic inches or 36.37 litres. The U.S. Customary System is slightly more measly and here a bushel is equal to 2.150.42 cubic inches or 35.24 litres.
With the interest of clarity for apple consumers at heart, I have been trying to research what this means. The nearest answer I’ve been able to find is that a bushel of apples weighs about 42 lbs, but I’m not sure if this is an American or an Imperial bushel of apples!

***

Handpicked Apples

Machines do an awful lot of work for us these days, but like many other fruits, apples are easily bruised when they are not handled with tender loving care. This means that most apples are still picked by hand, often by seasonal labour. (Illustration of hand-net, remote picker stick and ladder support for rough ground are being prepared and will appear here in the future).

***

Record breaking Apple

The largest apple ever picked, as far as known, weighed an amazing 3 lbs! It may not surprise anybody that this record breaker was grown in the USA!

***

Adam’s Apple

Christian folklore has often blamed Eve and her descendants for the fall from paradise. Adam however was usually seen as a reluctant partner in the act of eating the apple. It is said a piece of the forbidden fruit stuck in his throat and all his descendants ever after have had this lump in the front of their necks, hence it is still known to this day as ‘Adam’s apple’!
Why did the apple slide smoothly down Eve’s throat, but get stuck in Adam’s?
Well, eating an apple together has always been a symbol for sexual intercourse and the interesting thing is that the ‘Adam’s Apple’ has a lot to do with wakening sexuality.
When we are in our puberty, we change from children into adults. Surges of male and female hormones flow through our bodies and transform it so we can all take part in creating new life. We develop what we call ‘secondary sex characteristics’ (the ‘first sex characteristics are already in place in the form of our as yet undeveloped genital organs). Girls start menstruating and grow breasts. Boys may experience wet dreams and begin to grow facial hair. Almost every part in a teenager’s body grows and changes shape, including the larynx or voice box. You can feel this organ by touching the front of your throat and when you hum, you can feel the vocal cords in your larynx vibrating. As the voice box and the vocal cords within it become larger, due to hormonal changes, both male and female voices grow deeper. However, the male larynx increases far more in size than the female larynx, giving men their big booming voices.
When we hear a teenage boy talking with a squeaky voice, this happens because his larynx does not grow overnight. There is no apple or frog sticking in his throat, but it does indicate that he might be getting increasingly keen to taste the forbidden fruit….

***

The aroma of an apple

Most of the fragrance cells in an apple are concentrated in the skin. As the apples ripen, the skin cells develop the flavour and the lovely smell. The winy aroma of an apple has a stimulating sensuous quality. Some old healers held the opinion that the odour was good for melancholy, so it may have been used as an early form of aromatherapy. Queen Elizabeth I of England may well have tried this out. Dr. John Caius wrote a book called “Boke of Counseille against the Sweatynge Sicknesse”. In it he advised the patient to “smele to an old swete apple to recover his strengthe.”

***

Fiction or fact?

The ancient Roman historian Pliny and the medieval writer and traveller Sir John Mandeville (once known as ‘the Father of British literature’), both mention a race of little men in ‘Farther India’ who ‘eat naught and live by the smell of apples!

***

Hippocrates and the Apple

Hippocrates was a celebrated Greek physician who lived around 400 BC. He is often called “the father of medicine” and his famous “Hippocratic Oath” was for millennia the ethical foundation of the doctor- patient relationships. Hippocrates was a great advocate of nutritional healing. His favourite food remedies were apples, dates, and barley mush.

***

An apple tree in Manhattan

There was an historical apple tree in Manhattan once, which was reputedly one of the longest-lived Apple trees in America. It was planted in 1647 by Peter Stuyvesant (or more probably his servants or slaves), who had brought the tree all the way from Holland to plant in the orchard on his Manhatten farm. Stuyvesant was governor of New Amsterdam in the Dutch colony of the “New Netherlands”. He was an unconventional man full of many prejuidices and passions. He lost the colony to the English in 1647, after which New Amsterdam became New York. The tree was still bearing fruit in 1866 when a derailed tram struck it in 1866.

***

Long keeping apples

Some apple varieties are best eaten newly picked, but at the other end of the range there are apples with a remarkable keeping quality for a fresh fruit.
On the long journeys which our sailors used to make, there was always a danger of scurvy, a disease caused by lack of vitamin C, which caused general weakness, anaemia, gum disease, loose teeth and skin heamorrhages.
Long keeping apples, such as the ‘Hunthouse’ variety were taken to sea and were a precious resource in the days before canned fruit and vegetables and vitamin pills.
There is a variety called ‘Hambledon Deux Ans’, which can, with care, be kept for as long as two years.

***

A Marriage Proposal

Apples have always been closely associated with love and sexuality. (Please see: “Traditions and Lore of the Apple”). A young man, who wanted to propose to a woman in ancient Greece, would only have to throw her an apple. If she caught it, he knew she had accepted his offer.

***

The Northern Fruit tree

Most apples varieties are able to be grown much farther north than other fruit trees, because they blossom relatively late in the spring, often starting in the second half of April. This reduces the danger of the flowers being damaged by frost and therefore not being able to set fruit.

***

Floating apple

Apples are able to float because 25% of their volume is air.

***

Old apples

Archeologists have found apple seeds in Anatolia, which have been dated back to 6500 BC. They have also found fossilised apple seeds in England from the Neolithic Age. It is clear that people have been enjoyed apples for many thousands of years, but nobody know just how far back the cultivation of apples really goes.
It is known that in the Pharaoh Ramses II (1279-1213) ordered that cultivated varieties of apples should be planted in the Nile Delta. Ramses II is traditionally thought to be the Egyptian pharaoh of the Biblical Exodus story. This means that it is certain that cultivated apple orchards existed at least 3000 years ago. It is likely however that the tradition of apple growing goes back much further, because virtually all the ancient Pagan European people imagined paradise as an apple orchard. It is reasonable to assume that they must have had some experience, whilst still in their mortal bag of bones, of the magnificence of an orchard to envisage such a poetic image!

***

Ripe apples

Apples can ripen up to 6-10 times faster at room temperature than if they stored in a cool or refrigerated place.

***

Apples and the Olympic Games

It may well be that the apple was the inspiration for the gold medals awarded to athletes at the Olympic Games, because the original price was the mythical ‘Golden Apple’. The games originated in ancient Greece and the winners were given an apple spray, which symbolised a promise of immortality. (Please see also “Traditions and Lore of the Apple”).

***

Magic brew

Strong cider was once also known as the ‘Witches brew’ It certainly can provide some magic moments!
Its renowned health giving properties were believed to confer longevity on its regular consumers, as this chorus from a Devonshire drinking song testifies:
      “I were brought up on cider
      And I be a hundred and two
      But still that be 'nuthin when you come to think
      Me father and mother be still in the pink
      And they were brought up on cider
……Of the rare old Tavistock brew
      And me Granfer drinks quarts
      For he's one of the sports
      That were brought up on cider too”.

***

The apple is an apple….

In Northern Europe, including Britain the word ‘apple’ was for long centuries virtually a synonym for ‘fruit’, rather like ‘a cup of Nescafe’ used to be synonymous for a cup of instant coffee and ‘Hoover’ for vacuum cleaner. When Europeans began to explore the wider world, they brought all sorts of hitherto unknown fruits and vegetables back home. For a long time a great variety of exotic fruits were simply called ‘apples’, whether they would be oranges, avocados, potatoes, quinces, lemons, peaches, pineapples, pomegranates or tomatoes!
Robert Frost (a famous American poet, who lived from 1874-1963) was said to be rather amused by this and the reason why he wrote a little poem, which goes like this:
       ”The rose is a rose,
       And was always a rose.
       But the theory now goes
       That the apple's a rose.”
However, it could of course also be that Robert had just discovered that the Apple tree is classified botanically as a member of the Rose family.

***

Big Apple Business

The global production of apples is worth billions of pounds. Commercial orchards produce more than 40 million tons of apples every year, so that does not include the millions of apple trees in people’s gardens. China is presently the largest producer of apples in the world, followed by the USA in second place.

***

The apple, which inspired the foundation of modern physics!

Like many other school children, I was taught that Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, was sitting under an apple tree, when he was inspired by a falling apple to create his famous law of gravitation. From there onwards one thing led to another and life has never been the same ever since. The story made an immense impression on my childish imagination. Just as the apple had been the cause of our fall from paradise, I envisaged Newton’s Apple being responsible for taking us from a life of rural idyll into the modern world of technology with its space travel and nuclear bombs. And influenced by seeing cartoon-type pictures of the momentous occasion I also thought that the apple must have hit him bang on the head. Almost as if the resulting lump might have caused an enlargement of his brain, which caused this great insight.
Here is a more realistic version of what actually took place:
The actual incident took place when Newton was still a young man of around 22 or 23 years old (in 1665 or 1666). The plague was raging through England at the time. Isaac had gone to stay with his Mother at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire in the hope of escaping the dreaded disease. The young Newton had a wide range of interests, which included science, astronomy and astrology and was spending his days working on and writing about various problems.
He already knew that some force must exist to keep the Moon circling round the earth instead of flying off into space. He even knew how great this force must be and how it must be less if it was further away from the Earth. When he sat in the garden contemplating this puzzle in the shade of an Apple tree, he saw an apple fall from the boughs to the ground. It struck him that there must also be a force to make that apple fall onto the earth with a plop, rather than flying off into the air. His inspired insight was that the apple and the moon might be pulled towards the Earth by the same force! Like all brilliant discoveries, this seems maybe simple in retrospect, but utterly revolutionary at the time!

Newton realised that the same force, which would hold this imaginary cannonball in low orbit, might apply to the Moon as well! He did his calculations and showed that the idea fitted the facts. He had found an explanation for the orbital motions of the heavenly bodies, which enabled us thereafter to calculate these paths in the smallest details: Gravity rules!
The Apple tree, which provided the inspiration for this breakthrough died in 1814. However, several grafts were taken from the tree before its spirit went to the great Apple Orchards in the West. They were grown into new trees for Lord Brownslow’s kitchen garden in Belton. No one knows whether this happened because its variety, the ‘Flower of Kent’, was much sought after or simply because the squire wanted to preserve offspring of the famous tree. Maybe it was a case of catching two flies in one swoop. Newton’s story was certainly well known in the locality.
Descendants from Newton’s Apple tree were used to propagate trees at East Malling Research Station in 1940 and at the Botanical Gardens in Kew in 1943. It is nice to know that these living monuments have been multiplied and are especially appreciated by scientific institutions all over the world. Examples can be found in the gardens of Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, UK (21 miles north of London);The Cambridge Botanical Gardens, UK; Trinity College, Cambridge, UK; The Fellow’s Garden at Queen’s College, Cambridge, UK; The National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK; National Institute of Standards and Technology, Washington DC, USA; and the Dominion Physical Laboratory, New Zealand.

***

Back to Contents

HOME  |  CONTACT US  |  JOIN US  |   LINK TO US  |  SITEMAP  |  NO-FRAMES SITEMAP