intro

Hello again everybody! Hope you’ve all been praising Pomona and tasting her blessings this season. She is raining down fruit on us. A veritable avalanche of stone fruit, berries, and it’s bout time to dig in to the main event ! Here goes:

5th ANNUAL WILD AND SEEDLING POMOLOGICAL EXHIBITION

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 1ST, 10 AM – 4 PM
WILLIAMSBURG GRANGE HALL
10 MAIN STREET WILLIAMSBURG, MA 01096

This Fall, we’re going to have the fifth run at this crazy thing that we call PomEX 5! We will be gathering at the Williamsburg Grange once again to share our collective appreciation for the efforts of fruit explorers of the North American continent who have discovered noteworthy wild/uncultivated/seedling apples and pears that need to be shared with the wider community. I am almost brought to tears by how amazing the reception to this project has been. So grateful to have the momentum behind it to be able to keep this going. So blessed. As we are starting to build our own traditions around—and within—the practice of Pomological Exhibition,

The timing of this announcement is already feeling like I’m late, as the pace of ripening this year has been tangibly accelerated. With a very heavy crop regionally, the widely-understood consensus among growers is that a majority share of Summer apples are ripening 4-10 days ahead of the historic averages, respectively. As we continue into mid-season and late season fruits, this early-ness should level out a bit. However, the first wave of fruit has come on HOT and HEAVY. At the time I’m writing this (late August), I have already logged 10 submissions from folks who knew what the deal is! Without further ado: here’s the scoop!

HOW TO SUBMIT FRUIT TO THE EXHIBITION

Send a message to me using the CONTACT form on this website, or send an email to MATT@GNARLYPIPPINS.COM with the following info:

• Your name + the name of a farm, cidery, or organization that you would like to be associated with, and the town and state that you come from. If you don’t have any entity you’d like to associate with, that’s OK too!
• The name(s) of ALL apples and pears you plan to submit (even a provisional name will do, e.g., “Sarah’s Big Green” or “Stonewall Sweet”). Call it exactly what you refer to the apple or pear as. The maximum is 6 different varieties per entrant. Each entry MUST have a name.
• A brief description of each apple or pear.
  • Include information about the physical attributes of the apple, flavor, what it’s used for, the town and state that the mother tree is from, if it’s been grafted and grown ex-situ (in any instance other than the original tree).
• Other tidbits that you think are interesting or important, like what kind of environment the tree is growing in, the general shape or condition of the tree, observations about its hardiness. They will be evaluated using a pomological rubric to register all the esoteric information about the physical characteristics, so don’t get too hung up on that stuff. What I need from YOU is the background of the apple. All the info you can give that someone wouldn’t know by seeing and tasting it.

– Plan to set aside enough exemplar fruit! We need a minimum of 6 apples or pears of each variety, but having 10 or 12+ of each variety is much better! Since we hope to have many attendants viewing and tasting small samples of each, while also having enough to photograph each one (perhaps the “nicest,” whatever that means), and have a good enough sample size to document its characteristics with a formal pomological description.

PLEASE CONTRIBUTE ! This exhibition needs YOU in order to be great ! 

If you plan to attend the event on FRIDAY NOVEMBER 1ST, then submissions need to be in hand by 9AM on that day. If you can’t be there in time, or do not plan to come to the event but still want to have your favorite wildies recognized, please mail / ship your apples or pears through the mail to Gnarly Pippins HQ the week before the event. When you send your email to me with the above listed information, I will reply to you with the shipping address! 

**Please note that ‘repeat’ varieties that were sent in for previous Pomological Exhibitions are very much welcomed to be featured in the exhibition and tasting event itself, but will not be included in the forthcoming print publication.**

POMOLOGICAL SERIES VOL. 4 UPDATE

I can’t give away too much, but I am unable to contain my excitement about recent progress on Vol. 4. This is going to be the longest volume yet, with a total of 94 final selections out of the 165 that were submitted. The layout is set and we have designed this year’s cover! The signature loud, monochromatic, zoomed-in cover has taken shape, and we will be unveiling it at this year’s MAINE APPLE CAMP. For those lucky enough to be joining this year, you’ll have first access to the new design and sample pages from two outrageous varieties, BROILER CAPITAL RUSSET and BREAKFAST AT GRANDMA’S. I can’t wait to unveil the cover. The pre-order will go live and the preview will be unveiled to the public on Halloween 2024! Stay tuned there.

CIDER DAYS ’24

As you may well know, the Pomological Exhibition coincides with Franklin County Cider Days, the weekend-long celebration of apples and cider in Western MA that has been a pilgrimmage for devotees of Pomona for decades! This year marks the 30th anniversary! The day after the Exhibition, Saturday 11/2, I will be coordinating a day of educational lectures and tastings (apples and cider) at the Mill at Shelburne Falls located next to the Lamson factory store at 49 Conway St, Shelburne Falls, MA 01370. Hop on over to the Cider Days Website to stay up to date on all these updates!

THE REPORT FROM UP ON HIGH

In my preliminary scouting from this Spring and through the Summer, it seems like we’re just living through a major fruit year. A mast year, by all accounts. Apples are heavy in fruit, but in keeping with the natural tendency toward biennialism, the few pockets of New England that had little or no damage from last year’s frost seem to have a much lighter crop, whereas the areas that were damaged more severely last year are giving it up like it’s going out of style…FREIGHTED!

Some free and unorganized thoughts about the wisdom and intricacy of wild fruit trees and the ecosystems they inhabit.

From one of my earlier essays entitled “NATURAL CLOCKS” (posted in an earlier blog post) I attempt to convince you that apple trees, as one example of a natural clock, is one of the most sensitive timepieces there is, one that can understand and interpret time in a far more nuanced and non-linear way that humans can. If we expand this idea to include the sensibilities that other layers of the ecosystem aside from apples possess, we can wrap our heads around another paradigm of navigating the concept of “seasonality.” That is one layer of the very complicated matrix of agroecology that exists wherever organic/biological growing is being done, as well as in “wild” and uncultivated systems. I am trying to watch and understand. The best and brightest stewardship of tree crops will come when we can intimately observe natural ecosystems in a state of balance, and then mimic them within cultivated spaces. Natural dynamics and shifts in the balances between the various “layers” of these complex systems will cause a push and pull effect in the development, phenology, ripening, and seasonality of things. Seeing that these systems are responsive to those changes helps me realize that there are highly sensitive mechanisms working that are capable of considering factors over longer stretches of time than we assume. To review:

Winter ’22-’23: mild winter, little insect die-off due to mild temperatures
Late frost 2023: massive blossom kill
Summer ’23: Wet and cool year, unusually so, profuse vegetative growth and heavy flower bud set, intensified by the dearth of fruit in ’23. Super monster year.
Winter ”23-‘24: another mild winter, little insect die-off again.
Spring ’24: monster bloom and fruit set
Early Summer ’24: rose family plants going off – wild strawberry and raspberry heavy producers, SWD (drosophila) pest monitoring regionally in small fruits. Spongy moth, plum curculio, OFM, et. al. present in higher numbers earlier in the year.
Late Summer ’24 something happened: pest population cycle peaks early, this causes heavy fruit drop (push-off) vertebrate animals (birds like geese, woodpeckers, gnatcatchers, tit-mice, kingbirds, orioles, waxwings, especially, but also mammals respond to the uptick, pest numbers drop off, the result being fruit quality much higher than anticipated.

I find these type of broad, multi-year storylines fascinating. “Zooming out” and trying to pick up on the different layers at play in a matrix of relationships is honestly one of the keys to understanding where and why fruiting “mast years” occur, and how these things vary widely across regions and geographies. I studied agroecology in my undergraduate studies to analyze the profoundly interesting relationships at play here. But no scholastic work on these topics could really prime me for understanding the feeling of seeing these play out in practical applications.

Even more interesting is to consider how the collection of fruit trees that are thriving in a given year is a reflection of the high and low points in these long storylines of climate. Each one is a case study in ‘forces and factors.’ For example, this year in New England, I am noticing that the most frost-prone locations like east-facing valleys. wetlands+ swampy areas and the like, are absolutely loaded with fruit. The high north-facing and and western facing hills and slopes which often have better cold air drainage and are more frost-tolerant, are having a normal off-year due to a largely normal, good crop last year. I expect there to be plenty of deviations from this pattern, but that’s just my early observation, and I will hedge my bets on that basis, and spend more time looking for wild apples in valleys this year! Perhaps it would be a good year to take a leaf out of Aaron Burr Ciderworks’ (GOAT)book and make a locational cider from all the valley trees I forage from this year.

The silvopasture work with which I am involved deeply at Meadowfed Lamb (and on Instagram) @meadowfedlamb is how we are trying to put this theory into practice with apples and other tree crops. Animal life is of abundant importance in any orchard! If you dig silvopasture, please consider repping the team colors and check out our new and upcoming hat design, PRE-ORDER available now. On the topic of merch, the famous Gnarly Pippins logo tee shirts are also about to be restocked, much to the relief of knights of Pomona who have been wearing holes in their old tees…

That’s about enough for tonight! Stay tuned for more goodness regarding the Pomological Exhibition, Cider Days, Vol. 4 and please reach out with any questions on submissions for the Exhibition!

Love you all.