An Apple a Day!

It was a busy week last week, with preparations leading up to the big family Easter Egg Hunt and then the actual hunt, which we had late Saturday afternoon on what turned out to be one of the best days you could ever hope for when hosting such an event at the end of March.

So that is why I am just now posting some very big news after not posting much on my blog last week.

I finally have permission to make public the results of some plant breeding that I’ve been working on here in my garden.

With the help of several researchers, I am now able to have an apple a day, picked right from my own apple tree.

And I don’t mean picked, stored, and then plucked from storage.

I mean that every day… spring, summer, fall, and even winter… I can pick an apple off my tree and eat it.

How did we ever manage to breed such a tree?

Well, thanks for asking.

We crossed apple tree genes with rabbit genes to produce a tree that bears fruit as fast as a rabbit breeds and produces baby rabbits! It is really quite amazing! But obviously, for security reasons, I cannot post pictures of the actual apples so I’ve used a picture from Unsplash to represent them.

As with any plant breeding program, it all doesn’t go quite as perfectly as you’d hope all the time, so we are still working out a few issues before we release these apple trees to other gardeners.

First, there is the fur problem. The apples are covered with a tiny bit of fur, much like that on a rabbit, but it is easily removed with a good rubbing.

Second, we are still working a bit on the taste. Now I’ve personally never eaten rabbit, but people who have tell me that these apples taste a little bit like rabbit. We’ll have to work on that.

Also, we are working on public perception, which we anticipate to be mixed at best. Some people will think we hurt the rabbits with this breeding program. I can assure one and all that no rabbits have been harmed in giving up a little bit of their DNA. We usually just extract it from their fur, which… see above about the fur problem.

But even with the look and taste issues and the perception problem, overall, we are quite pleased with the results. The apples have inherited the one trait we had hoped they would inherit from the rabbits, and that is to produce offspring—apples—as quickly as rabbits seem to produce their offspring. That is why these trees, these remarkable apple trees, produce fruit nearly every day of the year, through spring, summer, fall, and winter.

And because of my role in the development of these trees—it was my idea in the first place—I get to name the variety!

I think I’m going to call them ‘April Fool’s Rabbit Apple’ because no one is going to believe how much fruit you can get from one tree!

(I was reminded when coming up with a name for this apple variety that my nieces used to have a pet rabbit. I wrote about it in my book Creatures and Critters: Who’s in My Garden. That rabbit was just coincidentally named Apple. Or was it serendipity?)

(Truly unrelated to the events of the day, for some reason, as of yesterday, March 31, Amazon is offering the paperback of Creatures and Critters for $5.66. I don’t know how long that price will last. They are normally $14.99. And Digging and Delighted is $10.82 on Amazon right now, also normally $14.99.)

(Anyway, now that it is April 1st, it really is GO TIME in the garden!)