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| BETWEEN STORMS |
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| A ROW OF CRAB APPLES... |
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| ...USED AS POLINATORS |
Tuesday, 9:00 AM. 71 degrees, wind E, light but changing to W. The sky is partly cloudy and the barometer again predicts rain, but it is a nice warm late spring morning. Lucky and I had a little misadventure at the beach this morning, he waded in the river and got caught by the current and had a tough time swimming back to the shore, where I finally could grab him. If he had actually gotten swept away I probably could have gotten to the sand bar at the mouth of the Sioux and caught him before he got further out into the lake. He ain't as young as he used to be. Come to think of it, neither am I. Dogs don’t really think much, they mostly react, and you have to think for them if you can, but the success of that depends upon whether they obey. Actually, that describes the relationship between God and man to pretty much to a T. Anyway, all’s well that ends well.
Apples and flowering crab apples are both in the genus
Malus and therefore are so closely related that although they may not produce viable hybrids, the crab apples can be used to provide enough extra pollen to assure pollination of commercial apples, and they have been so used for many years. The common Asian crab apple,
Malus baccata, was introduced into this country in the Nineteenth Century for that purpose, and that species has been hybridized with native North American and other Asian crab apples to produce the myriads of commercially available crab apple varieties. Technically,
Malus is a sub-genus of
Pyrus, the pear family. And the apple is often named scientifically as
Pyrus malus. But, as our daughter Eva’s sixth grade class would say, “TMI! TMI!” (translation: Too Much Information! Too Much Information!).
The crab apples shown here are grown in rows in the apple orchards and make a very colorful display.
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