Science-art-magic

Best ever Arboriculture lab yesterday. We got the grand tour of the palm garden at Project Artaud with its curator, Benjy Young.

The man himself, Benjy Young
We were regaled with the history of Project Artaud and stories of growing up with a dad who was in love with palms. Apparently, being a lover of rare species means classy garden parties with the elite, phone calls from Africa offering rare fifty pound seeds that look like 'a woman's pelvis,' international seed trading, jungle expeditions, tree climbing and intrigue!

I have not only a newfound appreciation for palms of all stripes, but this sense of Yes This Is What It's All About.

Palms, it turns out, grow really well in San Francisco because it's always cold at night, but never gets a chill - something palms love.

Probably the most awesome plant was this:

Chilean Wine Palm (Jubaea chilensis)
That thing is seriously at least three feet wide, and they can live for over a hundred years. Monks called wine made from this beast ethereal (you drain the trunk like sugar cane), but wine making was outlawed in Chile just in the nick of time to save them from extinction.

As monocots, palms don't produce secondary growth like most trees you see with annual rings of old xylem produced by the vascular cambium.

Monocots	Dicots
(xylem & phloem in bundles throughout stem)	(xylem & phloem organized into rings)

Palms do all their horizontal growing first - before growing vertically at all - since they can't put on girth later on. To give you an idea, this palm is three years old:

Baby Nikau palm (Rhopalostylis sapida)
By comparison, fast growing dicot trees could be six feet tall at three years old. Just imagine how long it takes the palm to get to this size:

Mama Nikau palm
We got to take home those Nikaud palm seedlings, since Benjy's adult tree was so prolific with seeds - in those red pods - and he treated us to fresh coconuts and plates of Medjool and Zahidi dates. Such a magical day.

Cush

I have a li'l soft spot in my heart for throw pillows for the way they add a functional lushness to a space, and I find that Moroccan pillow covered sofa look super inviting.

Of course Anthropologie makes perfect ones:

I like the material on these - sort of a rough-ish natural color linen with good textural interest.


And of course the nautical theme.


Also love the classy and simple linen - black color scheme.

I am def a fan old fashioned block prints, esp. with natural science subjects. Like, you could do butterfly diagrams or leaf illustrations. I love shadow boxes with bugs and things on the wall, but I like the idea of bringing this out into something you can touch. Friendlifying science, if you will.

And I don't know how to screen print (yet), esp not with multiple color layers, but I could whip out something like these:


I like this zig-zag, the orange-black-white color scheme for its bold simplicity, and the fabric texture, which they claim is silk.


I am always a fan of stripes. These might be a little bright, but you could do it with more sedate colors, or whatever goes with what you've got going on.

These almost remind me of some mosaics I've done. It would be cool to try a patchwork drawing or to test out geometric designs or even to attempt some kind of hybrid with that natural science aesthetic - doing some kind of applique of leaf silhouettes, though I'd be wary of making it look too kitschy.

Pillows should be so easy to make, and probably for less than the $80-$100 Anthro charges. I have so much spare fabric lying around, I'd love to try some things. Looks like a pretty simple sewing job and shouldn't take too much time, even by hand.

All I need is pillow for the stuffing. That seems like the hardest thing to track down. I should try Ikea again, but their pillows can be really limp, and I don't know if they have plain ones small enough. Once I get that though, I shall take Etsy by storm!

All tuckered out

Didn't remember till after an hour-ish of mattock swinging in the noon heat that the blood drive people admonished doing heavy labour while I'm down a pint of blood. Pretty satisfying bit of work even if I'm feeling dead to the world now.

The Int'l Ag Dev folks at UC Davis have gotten back to me too. They even say they'll hook me up with some profs and current students when I visit if they can. It's a bit overwhelming, even. Feeling like I need to step up my game.

I'm torn about the whole Ag v. Ecology thing, though. On the one hand, I'd assume there's money in agriculture. Or, at least it's a problem putting a little money towards solving. Industry with lots o' money poured into it, even if not much comes back out. All this talk about water reclamation makes me wonder what the difference between dams and swales is. At the end of the day are we still just pitting ourselves against nature? I know finding a way to put plants back on salty land can't be a bad thing, and swales are meant to use natural processes to store water in the earth the way nature does it, but I'm feeling wary of all this Cultivation. I'm wanting to run off into the woods. I want to be sent to remote beautiful places and get paid to explain to people why they should appreciate them. ...before they're terraced.

Escaping the house

Took a little me-time today to bake zucchini bread and email the folks at UC Davis and Cal Poly Pomona, and the Ecology people at Davis got back to me within the hour! Bless them! The one faculty dude pointed me to the new dept head and a couple professors whose research interests might be up my alley. These are the #2 ranked people in the country for this stuff, and they are talking to me! I am going to escape to the park to celebrate by reading about soil and plant diseases while eating hummus to pump up my iron so I can donate blood at the Red Cross tomorrow. I even made myself an appointment.

Metabolism

A dream in which there is a small world contained on a cruise ship. Or a fleet of cruise ships which offer an infinitude of choice. Anything can be changed at any time at your will. You can trade in your cat for a younger cat and younger cat. You can trade in your deck chair. You can choose your food. The shape of your cabin. Colors. Everything. The ship itself can grow and adapt. It can suit your needs.

The ships are run by a company named Google My Army. Except in the cruise ship world, it doesn't say Google as clearly. The words are somehow refracted back so as not to remind you of anything. They make everything on the ship. The clothes have Google My Army tags. They raise the cats. Fluffy white cats. Silky black kittens. Striped cats. Splotchy cats.

There is a marathon going on. One of my cousins is participating. It's some sort of one person at a time marathon that includes a run up the long slide usually used to deliver guests to one of many pools. I would assume you're able to choose the outcome of the marathon. Also participating are the company executives. I believe I was in the employ of one who will, upon finishing the race, assume control of the company. He is young, a man to be feared.

I am wanting to escape. To leave, you need a voucher for the boat taxis that will take you back to land. I am in a small deckside restaurant. A light woven structure with a tiki style bar and stools. There are five or six other patrons. The new president approaches, but I am wearing a hat and glasses so as not to be recognized. It seems it wouldn't matter because he is drunk. In his dark jollity, he stuffs his taxi voucher in the band of my hat because he likes the way it looks, like an old press pass. I am holding a book, some sort of illicit book, but he gives me, the lone stranger, another book he likes to share. I slip the folded taxi voucher into my book and hide it under his, always keeping mine closer to my chest. He is feeling social. The restaurant patrons are quiet and on guard. He has taken an interest in me.

Someone must have wished the restaurant away because the hands of god begin to remove its walls. We can now see the ovens and right off the edge of the ship. We can watch the bartender/cook as he scurries about. I believe there was a roast chicken in the oven. Someone must have ordered it.

The president wants to dance. With me. I don't cross him lest he see through my glasses and recognize my face. He puts his arm snugly around my back. He appears to feel romantic. I hold on to my books. He is tired and cannot find his taxi voucher. His father is calling for the almanac data listed on the taxi voucher. He brings me to his room to search for it. The room is small and messy with two beds. The cook from the restaurant is sleeping motionless face down on the larger bed, feet near the pillows. I think we are leaving. The president slips out the door, but closes it behind him. I try to open it, but it will not move. I lean close to the door to pull on it. A knife stabs through. Any closer and

I wonder if the cook is dead, but decide to wake up.

I admit I've been putting off some emotions for later. Burying them in hopes that they might smolder out on their own, but it would seem they are floating back up to the surface at night, coloring my dreams.

Lots of loss going on these days, it feels like. I never used to lose things and now they disappear from my nightstand or fall out of my pocket or I come home to them broken but piled neatly on the floor.

I was feeling the other day like I'd had a good pruning. Maybe not unlike the trees we saw moved up to the next container size at the Boething Treeland yesterday, with their big, big roots cut so as not to be girdling later on. Pruning is invigorating, they say. Only now I'm feeling like more of the dieback.

Raising the bar

Had a little chatlet with my plant disease professor this morning before class, which I've been meaning to do. It turns out I'm the only one I know (or that anyone knows, for that matter) taking five classes. Why would you want to do that?, she wanted to know. Because I took that many classes in college?, I said. And she reminded me of what passes through my own mind from time to time - that you don't have to do everything that you could do. College kids can do that, she said, but adults have life to take care of. I probably have to clean my own apartment and cook my own food, she ventured. This is true. It usually doesn't occur to me that it's ok to take care of stuff for me. Still, I suppose I feel more comfortable being as hard as possible on myself.

All during class I thought maybe I'd go easy on myself next semester. And then I compared lists of required courses for our different horticulture certificates with what's available in the spring on the bus ride home and have mentally signed up for five more classes, including the third semester of Spanish.

Seed savers

I heard that there's a new seed store in Petaluma and that the owners (among other things, presumably) take one trip a year to a new place, go to farmers markets, eat good food and save the seeds to bring back. I would definitely be willing to do that for money.

I suppose antique dealers get to go on fun trips too, but I like the tie in with farmers markets, food and encouraging biodiversity. Granted there could be some concerns around invasive species not to mention import laws, but, still, one could do worse things for a living.

The art of brewing kombucha

Kombucha is tea fermented by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that looks kind of like a mushroom top and feels like rubber. Not everyone is a fan of kombucha. It smells like vinegar and can taste just as sour, but the more cultured (ha) of us love it. If you are one of these, you have noticed how quickly the money drains from your wallet when you buy it bottled in the store.

I can't corroborate the health claims that kombucha energizes, detoxifies, supports a healthy digestive and immune system, has anti-aging properties, promotes tissue and blood alkalinity, or normalizes homeostasis throughout the body, but it does make me feel good in a healthy, clean way, and I actually like the taste when it's done right.

So, here's how I make it. Or, in other words, how to do it right.

Preparation.
First, you will have acquired a large glass jar. Glass - not plastic, not metal. (See above). The bigger, the better, I say. My jar holds about 2L. This is a good size to sate the needs of one regular kombucha drinker. Ikea used to have such jars. You can also likely find such things at Costco, although there you will have needed first to eat an obscene amount of something prior to the jar's being available for kombucha brewing.

Next, you will have befriended someone who is already brewing kombucha and can give you a culture. I recommend myself for this. Once you express your interest in brewing kombucha, you friend will deliver to you a culture in a (likely smaller) glass jar of its own. It will be living in its fermented tea. If you have completed this step prior to step one, you may store your new pet in the refrigerator for a few days until such time as you are able to progress with your brewing.

Brewing.
You can think of your kombucha culture as an acid-loving goldfish whose water you like to drink. Your culture is alive. It is your new pet. Your kombucha mushroom pet does not like to share its tea with chlorine or other microbes. Therefore, you will take the pot in which you will brew your tea and fill it with water ONE DAY BEFORE you intend to start the actual tea brewing (2L water for 2L tea). You will leave this pot of water on the counter UNCOVERED for the next 24 hours. This will allow chlorine and various other minerals dissolved in your tap water to evaporate.

The next day, you will relocate your pot of water (now with less chlorine) to the stove where you will bring it to a boil, also UNCOVERED. Boiling kills any living things residing in your water as well as encouraging more of those minerals to evaporate. It also heats up your water for the tea brewing. Yes, it will take longer to boil. When the water starts to bubble, you will dissolve in it about 1/2 cup granulated white sugar (1/2c sugar for 2L tea - or 1c sugar per gallon). Not honey, not brown sugar - your kombucha wants to eat glucose, not molasses, not fructose and whatever other acids are in honey. When your sugar is fully dissolved in a nice rolling boil, turn off the heat.

You will now choose three to four bags of tea to steep in your 2L sugar water (6 bags for 1G tea) and add them to the pot. (Yes, some water will have evaporated during boiling. This is art, not science). You will use black, green or white tea. You will not use herbal tea. Your kombucha is interested in the caffeine and has no interest in exposing itself to the mystery of herbal tea. I recommend floral black/green/white teas. Jasmine green tea is a personal favorite. I have also done well with rose black tea or a peony white tea, &c., for example. You will be tempted to try Earl Grey tea because you have it in your cupboard. Luckily, I have already attempted this and can inform you that the kombucha tea you brew will taste foul. Earl Grey kombucha is available commercially; it tastes similarly foul. Oil of Bergamot is not a flavour that sits well with vinegary kombucha. That is the definitive truth.

You will now allow your kombucha to come to room temperature. Would you put your goldfish in boiling water? You would not. Do not cook your kombucha culture. You will wait for the tea to come to room temperature. This will take hours. Find something to do. If you must, you may steep your tea in the refrigerator. It will cool faster, but it will still take hours. It is ok if your tea is colder than room temperature.

Fermentation.
And now, the coup de grâce. You will rinse out your large glass jar. You will pour your sweet tea into the jar. Then, you will pour some of the liquid your kombucha baby has been living in into the jar, add the culture itself, and then pour a little more of its old tea on top. This is to keep some of the acidic environment it is used to.

You will cover the top of your jar with a paper towel and secure it with a rubber band or length of string. You can find something else to use your cheese cloth for. Use a paper towel. Cheese cloth lets too much through. Do not seal the jar - your kombucha needs to breathe.

Find a nice cool spot out of the sun and away from plant debris, living things, or whatever else you have in your kitchen and let your tea ferment until it tastes good to you. The longer you wait, the stronger it will get as your culture consumes the sugar in the tea, but if you wait too long, it will start to turn bitter. I like the way mine tastes after about 8 or 9 days, but this will vary with temperature and personal preference. I would say 7-12 days is normal, though.

Carbonation.
When you were acquiring your large glass jar in which to brew you kombucha, you will also have acquired some sealable glass bottles like this --->

Pour the kombucha tea into your sealable glass bottle(s), keeping enough liquid in your original jar to cover the kombucha culture (~2-3" of liquid). Most of your kombucha yeast-bacteria will live in its mushroom colony, but some will be floating about at the top and bottom of the jar. Try to get as little of this in the bottle as possible. Some will get in. This can be a good thing. 2L tea usually produces ~750mL bottled tea with some left over, which you can seal in a smaller bottle if you like.

You will have noticed at the grocery store that the better brands of kombucha have fruity flavours and you will want to make fruity flavoured kombucha yourself. If you feel compelled to make fruit flavoured kombucha, you will add fruit juice to your bottle now, as you will have left some extra space when decanting the tea into your bottle. You will under no circumstances add fruit juice to the jar with your kombucha mushroom. Would you pour juice into your goldfish bowl? You would not. Stroll the grocery store for kombucha juice flavour ideas. I like to use pomegranate or pomegranate-lime juice because it's nice and thin. It will not even occur to you to use a thick, pulpy juice because the thought of mixing it with your kombucha disgusts you.

To get a nice fizz, you will leave your bottled tea out on the counter for another week while you brew the next batch of kombucha. (Now is a good time to start again with your next batch). Keeping the bottled tea at room temperature encourages whatever strands of kombucha escaped into your bottle to consume any additional sugar in the tea. However, because the bottle is sealed, the gas produced will carbonate your tea.

Chilling.
Kombucha undeniably tastes better cold, so you will move your bottle of carbonated tea to the refrigerator once it's had a chance to work up a good bit of carbonation out on the counter. It will still carbonate further in the refrigerator, but much more slowly. Better to give it a kick start out on the counter.

Enjoy.

-------
Q&A, mostly A
Yes, you should move your culture and its remaining tea to a glass bowl and rinse the jar with water prior to pouring in your second batch of room temperature sweet tea.
-
No, mold on your kombucha culture is not a good. Kombucha is not cheese; it should not have mold. Compost or toss out your baby. Your friend undoubtedly has another kombucha baby you can have. Or, if you've made a few batches you may well have a spare baby yourself.
-
Your kombucha baby is getting particularly thick and sort of splitting into two disks because it has grown too big to live as a single colony. Half-ish of your culture has decided to strike out on its own and form a new colony, not unlike the ways bees form a new hive when their colony is too populous. Get used to this. Your baby will reproduce just about every two weeks. Keep the fresher, whiter colony for brewing your tea and compost or save your spare older colonies in the refrigerator. You will of course cover any saved cultures in their tea and keep them in a jar covered with paper towel. Every once in a blue moon your friends will ask you for one of these cultures so that they can start brewing tea of their own. You will be grateful. You will be even more grateful when they kill a few yeast babies getting started so that you can offload more than one.
-
Yes, you can store your kombucha culture in its jar in the refrigerator while you go on vacation. The cooler temperature will slow its metabolism down, but make it a fresh batch of sugar tea first so that it doesn't starve.

Personal quandary

When I was in elementary school, my dad had a black Oldsmobile with a personalized license plate that read - PHD FMLY. He bought it when he and my mom finished their doctoral dissertations in Computer Science at UCLA. I'd compiled a pictoral dissertation in smelly marker myself on the floor of the computer lab while my parents worked on the weekends. Come to think of it, I grew up at UCLA. I don't remember what I said when kids would see my dad's car in the pick up line at school and ask if I had a PhD, but I always assumed I would have one. Because that is what you do.

Except that I don't have a PhD. I'm not sure if I want one because I'm actually interested in pursuing the careers it would open to me, or if I just need the encouragement of a piece of paper on the wall stating that I've done something with myself. Probably both. Nevertheless, I feel wildly jealous of everyone in graduate programs and with graduate degrees.

I think I've seen two measures of success: 1. Graduate school and 2. Producing offspring. I don't think I've done nothing all these years, but I don't seem to have gotten anywhere with either of those two. I'd like to think of my goal as Love/Happiness - because if you've found those, what does it matter how you got there or what it looks like? - but it's hard to know I'm on the right track or on the track at all.

Perhaps I should try this...

Half-thought on GMOs

I've never been a fan of genetically modified anything on principle. My instincts tell me to let nature run its course and propagate polycultures of heirloom crops, rather than fuel the industrial agriculture beast by buying Bigger, Better crops for a premium.

...But I was listening to the radio* the other night, and there was a guy talking about Africa, the green revolution, and ending world hunger, and he mentioned that he'd be in favor of offering small scale African farmers GM crops as long as they were beneficial to the farmers (as opposed to something that just made your corn a prettier shade of yellow for end consumers). I am leaving out the bulk of his argument, but the gist was that these guys need all the help they can get.

I am torn. On the one hand, I'm still concerned about selecting for unkillable pests, but plant diseases (as I'm learning) can be more than a handful, and I'm not sure I'd begrudge a small farmer disease resistant crops if it meant he could use fewer pesticide sprays (that a lot of these guys administer themselves by hand - chemicals on one shoulder, and a kid on the other) and possibly saved him and his family from hunger in a bum year.

Is there really such a big difference between natural evolution and human-assisted mutation? Maybe it really is a pipe dream to think we could feed the world's hungry without disease resistant varietals. At some point I should properly look into this sort of thing and weigh the pro's and con's. I'd be more willing to give GMOs a chance if you could take the big business aspect out.

In any case, I still maintain that polyculture never hurt anyone...


*(Broadcast of The Forces Behind Famine - Roger Thurlow speaking at the World Affairs Council on 8/11/2009)

Composting 101: Dealing with flies

My worm bin has always been on the wet side, with most of the finished compost dripping through the wide grating at the bottom of my Wriggly Wranch, which hasn't really bothered me because there are enough worms swimming around in the lower level to suggest that it hasn't become too anaerobic (lacking the oxygen worms and other organisms need to do their decomposing), but it's also been more fly-prone than usual lately, which needless to say isn't my favorite thing about composting.

With all that life going on, it was nice that we had a little composting refresher in my Permaculture class the other day to help sort things out. Here are some helpful tidbits of info, should you find yourself with a worm bin:

1. The kind of little flies or other insects that tend to come with worm composting generally have about a 14 day life cycle. So, if you ever have a serious problem, make sure to stop adding food to your bin for at least 14 days to wait out the current cycle.

2. Flies need a moist environment to lay their eggs and produce the next generation of their kind, so you want to keep your bin as dry as possible. Wetness in and of itself isn't a problem, but it provides a happy environment for fly larvae and makes your finished compost a little messier than you might like, whereas drier compost would be less likely to drip through the grate at the bottom of your bin. Other advantages of relatively dry compost are that the anaerobic liquid also being produced during the decomposition process can leak to the bottom (which is what that spout is there to release, if you have one) without contaminating your compost and that harvesting might not be quite as messy.

Some simple ways to dissuade flies from colonizing your bin include:

Adding more newspaper to the top.
Leave as much as 6" of newspaper strips over your foodscraps. For more serious fly problems, you can also lay a few sheets of whole newspaper over the top to create more of a barrier. More newspaper can also help with odor problems.

Use drier foodscraps.
Worms (and the other decomposers) love to eat the vegetables left over from making vegetable stock, but these are really wet. To dry out stock left overs, I've started leaving them out on the stove once I've poured off the stock I'll be using and allowing them to air dry or turning the heat back on under my pot to further dry the scraps out.

Always add food scraps UNDERNEATH newspaper.
The harder it is to get to food scraps, the less likely flies will discover and gorge themselves on them. Tossing your food scraps on top makes it easy for pests to find them and harder for your worms. Scraps on top will take longer to decompose, which can lead to rotting, which means bad smells and probably more flies.

Cracks and flashes

Woke up at five to thunder and lightning and rain, which is one of my favorite ways to wake up. It feels special, and I've been missing special.

Were you aware of it? vol. 20: Good news in Texas

The NYT reported recently on Dan Phillips and his new construction company, Phoenix Commotion, based in Huntsville, TX. With NPR reporting on our continued adventures with the housing crisis, this man is doing some really awesome stuff for his community.

Phoenix Commotion is building low income housing for the Huntsville community by acquiring lots inexpensively and building houses entirely out of salvaged materials. The finished product may not look like the other houses on the block, but they're well designed, totally up to code, and pretty dang good looking.

See for yourself:

Roof made of old shingles.
Osage Orange wood countertop - abundant locally.
Ceiling made of old frame samples.
Cattle bone backed chair.

Phillips insists that future owners help with construction à la Habitat for Humanity, but Phoenix Commotion isn't a nonprofit. Phillips keeps profit margins relatively slim, but he wants to prove that low income housing is viable as a business model. In the process his efforts have helped Huntsville organize channels for the collection and dispersal of salvageable/salvaged building materials.

Even if some of the 15 original owners have been booted out of their homes by the financial crisis (moving the homes into middle class hands), it's a noble effort, and I'm glad to see someone taking on good looking, low income housing.

See the original article.

New life, day 8: Regulating

Dude, I should have been a scientist. I am kicking school's butt so far. Granted I'm taking classes at community college after getting hard core on myself at Berkeley, but still. I was pleased that even coming into Soil Management in the third week, it took about 15 minutes before I was taking charge of the lab and explaining how to do the calculations to my group. I have a good group of folks - don't get me wrong - but I was jazzed to be able to soak up this new stuff so quickly.

I expect school to be easy. Busy, but easy. Even if my classes are geared more for future gardeners than future Ecology PhDs, It feels good to be getting my feet wet. It feels good to be surrounded by plants.

I am feeling mostly good these days. Inspired to be super social, and so far, so good. I was a chatty Cathy at the Botanical Garden on Saturday shoveling with Ilie and the gang. Not even the guys shoveled the whole time. I think I was the only one, but it felt good being outside, doing manual labour.

I even made a potential new pal/bus buddy in Permaculture on Friday. We'll see. I think he's in Soil Management too, which reminds me I still have oodles of reading to do, but I'm looking forward to it. And there was the other Russian girl from Soil Management who was also super sweet. Soon enough I'll be able to tell you all about how to prune your fruit tree and why. Or I will be able to do a textural analysis of your soil and measure your field capacity. Or grow food. Or identify plant diseases. In short, I will be cool.

And today: Labour Day Garden Party! Quelle success! So good to see everyone, even R&C, who I feel like I see almost every day now (and am loving every minute of it - way to move closer, guys!). So many people, such a good time! Yay for parties. May there be many more of them.

la fille au verre d'eau

Today would be a good day to have a man-friend, I am realizing as I am strategizing how to transport a party's worth of food, three instruments, three cameras, a croquet set, picnic blanket, and the various and sundry down the street to the park, where my party will begin to take place as soon as I manage to get there.

Were you aware of it? vol. 19: Sierra Beauty apples

Discovered these at Berkeley Bowl when a man turns to his son and says, "These are the best apples you'll ever have." It's true.


Large, handsome apple with thin green and yellow skin, striped or blushed red. A favorite apple from Boonville, CA. Juicy, very crisp, rich, tart, sprightly flavor. A good seller in farm markets and an excellent keeper.

Generally late blooming. Need full sun, well-drained soil, and moderate fertility. The tree is compact. Unpruned, semi-dwarf trees reach 85% of standard (about 15—25'), but by pruning you can keep your tree to any desired height. Thin fruit to maximize quality and size. Susceptible to codling moth, apple scab, powdery mildew, and gophers. Generally cross-fertile, which means that the variety is not pollinated by itself, but by a different variety of the same fruit. Three or more varieties are best. Harvest 3rd year.

Bloom: Midseason
USDA Zone: 6,7,8,9
Pollination: Self-fertile
Fruit Storage: Excellent
Mature Size: Medium
Ripens: Very Late
Uses: Fresh eating/ dessert, cooking (puree, applesauce, apple butter), baking
Rootstock: Semidwarf

Order an heirloom apple tree.