Pomiferous: The most extensive apples (pommes) database

by Ariarule • 3 months ago

141 50 3 months ago

500 error. Hope it comes back online soon, I really want to see this one!

samch• 3 months ago

Nice database (got a brief glimpse before it was hugged to death). Personally, I’ve always really liked this apple rating site (no affiliation):

https://applerankings.com/

grebc2• 3 months ago

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.

mapt2• 3 months ago

Some of these are a moving target.

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-honeycrisp-apples-went-from-...

IncreasePosts2• 3 months ago

Blanket apple ratings are silly. You need ratings for apple on hand, baking apple, pig apples, etc.

culi4• 3 months ago

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?

culi4• 3 months ago

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)

bigbuppo• 3 months ago

I read that wrong at first.

tzot• 3 months ago

I blame font keming for that.

bcatanzaro• 3 months ago

OMG

TechSquidTV5• 3 months ago

Ha! I very recently started something for peppers (Capsicum) https://pepperrank.com/

mapt2• 3 months ago

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.

philipkglass2• 3 months ago

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.

TechSquidTV5• 3 months ago

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.

mcdonje• 3 months ago

Why are you making my screen look dirty? lol

TechSquidTV5• 3 months ago

lol I kind of thought it made it look like a hot sauce label. but maybe not.

chadd• 3 months ago

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/

culi4• 3 months ago

I've seen some similar sites

https://pepperscale.com/hot-pepper-list/

https://scovillescale.org/

https://pepperdatabase.org/

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

TechSquidTV5• 3 months ago

all objectively better names

dsecurity49• 3 months ago

It’s refreshing to see a site that’s just a database without five popups asking for a newsletter subscription. Just pure, unadulterated pomology

thaumasiotes2• 3 months ago

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".

FarmerPotato8• 3 months ago

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.

FarmerPotato8• 3 months ago

pomiferous looks like a labor of love. Labor is finite.

I use this site for many years: https://www.orangepippin.com

wxw• 3 months ago

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?

FarmerPotato8• 3 months ago

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.

financetechbro• 3 months ago

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

halapro2• 3 months ago

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.

throwaway7328• 3 months ago

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.

FarmerPotato8• 3 months ago

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.

halapro2• 3 months ago

Unless you live in the desert, most likely you can have better local seasonal fruits than apples, you don't need to transport them from across the globe.

It's really quite unfortunate because the overabundance of apples and oranges means that nobody cares about the local seasonal fruits and they risk going extinct.

biotinker2• 3 months 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/

armenarmen• 3 months ago

That’s awesome! Do you guys ever cross reference with https://fallingfruit.org/ (Google map layer of fruit trees)?

biotinker2• 3 months ago

We don't because those are mainly younger trees in people's yards.

Our nonprofit has a fairly extensive list of trees we catalog and maintain on both public and private land. Here's the public trees: https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/All_Trees

But our mission is really heritage trees, which we loosely define as pre-WWII. We do work with landowners to get their trees DNA tested and identified if they're interested. But despite maintaining the encyclopedia I linked in the other comment, we're a small group of volunteers (~6 people) and are mainly focused on a specific geographic region.

linsomniac• 3 months ago

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.

FarmerPotato8• 3 months ago

Here's another heritage apple site: http://www.westonapples.com

fsckboy• 3 months ago

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.

withinrafael• 3 months ago

I remember I used to regularly seek out varieties and look them up on https://www.orangepippin.com/. I wonder how this database compares!

MostlyStable• 3 months ago

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.

Pomiferous: The most extensive apples (pommes) database

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