This is different take on Johnny Appleseed than I’ve heard before.
Yeah, he goes into a good deal of detail about this in Botany of Desire.
Are we talking hard cider here? Because if we are … I’ll drink to that!
Well, Johnny Appleseed was quite a character, and he was dedicated to his cause, so it’s easy to write articles about him for kids, while leaving out the alcohol aspect.
And if the Delicious was the best tasting apple that Jesse Hiatt had ever tasted, then I feel sorry for him. I’ve always found it to be mealy and bland. Those are good qualities in a potato, but not in an apple.
And I looooove cider.
If you read the article or book, it says that most apples were pretty much inedible out of hand until the Red Delicious. Which isn’t mealy when it’s fresh.
I’ve also heard that he was a Swedenborgian and also was spreading the word about that particular brand of christianity.
From the Swedenborg web site:
Have you ever had a Delicious from an old tree, from before the variety was standardized to the sort you buy in stores nowadays? They don’t look much like the tall, uniformly deep red, almost rectangular-prism-shaped ones you see now - they’re much smaller, rounder, more classically apple shaped. They taste wonderful. They’re juicy, sweet without being too sweet, with a good crunch to them. They just don’t store and ship as well as the modern variants, which weren’t bred for flavor.
This looks snarky. I didn’t mean it to be snarky.
Well, you do need some coffee. 
No, I haven’t had such a Delicious apple. That sounds like a pear to me, though. 
As I’ve mentioned in another thread, it isn’t obvious to me that Appleseed’s apples could only be used for hard cider. Granted, this really was the use most apples went to in the nineteenth century (just visit someplace like Sturbridge Village, and they’ll tell you). But such “inedible” apples could also be used for apple cider vinegar, and vinegar was very widely used in that era for cooking, preserving, cleaning, and in the making of “shrub” and other such things.
In addition, it seems far more likely to me that Appleseed was planting those orchards as a source of rootstock for edible varieties. There was a thriving business in grafters that came around and would sell and emplace fruit buds from edible trees into your rootstock – and it took the rootstock about seven years to grow – which is about the time before the settlers came that John Chapman started his apple trees growing.
I don’t know why Pollan – who clearly researched his book very heavily 9I was lucky enough to see the TV version of his Botany of Desire recently) overlooked this salient possibility.
:eek:
a mile is 5250 feet. lets call it 5000.
Planting trees at 50 ft intervals you can fit 100 trees x 100 trees in a square mile. That’s 10,000 trees.
If it takes 10 seconds to plant a tree than 1 square mile can be planted in 27.777 hours w/o breaks or resupply.
27.777 x 100,000 = 2777700 hours to plant 100,000 square miles = 115,000 + days or about 317 years to plant all those trees in ten second intervals with no breaks.
I didn’t have to do the math to know that number was far beyond any attempt at honesty. This is my first and last time bothering with the ‘straightdope’.
Considering that the combined land area of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana is only about 120,000 square miles, you’re absolutely correct that it’s a ridiculous number.
But don’t leave because of that. We love nit-pickers here.
Welcome to the Dope. You’ll fit right in.
Maybe it was 100,000 acres?
Maybe he “planted” them in the sense that he gave the farmers the means to do so?