alt Hacker NewsThats awesome! I'm doing apple stuff on the other side of the Cascades (Eugene), starting a cidery and trying to find rare varieties to graft. And doing little software projects like https://pomological.art/. Would love to get in touch if you want people to propagate these varieties you're finding and would potentially be interested in sharing some scion wood!
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joshmarinacci • today at 9:38 PM
You’re in Eugene!? Me too. I’d love to meet up some time to talk about your software over coffee.
Oh cool! I've used pomological.art! Great site!
I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s.
The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content.
It's not fully done yet, there are bugs/issues right now but you can take a look here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/
I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available.
I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.