Maria Allen
An apple is a fruit that grows on a fruit tree. If we see or eat an apple, it is usually a cultivated apple. This is a special kind. There are many other types of apples that you can’t eat. The apple is considered a pome fruit because there are tiny seeds inside. Apples can have red, yellow, or green skin. The peel is edible, and most vitamins are found below it.
There are large apple crops in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as in other European countries. The apple is our favorite fruit. This is probably due to the fact that they are easy to transport and do not need to be peeled before eating. More and more apples are brought to us in large ships from South America and sold here.
A distinction is made between the three heights of apple trees: The standard trees were mainly used earlier. They were scattered on meadows so that the farmer could use the grass. Medium trees are more likely to be in gardens. That’s still enough to put a table underneath or to play. The most common today are low trees. They grow as a trellis on a house wall or spindle bushes on a plantation. The lowest branches are already half a meter above the ground. So you can pick all the apples without a ladder.
Depending on the variety, apples ripen from summer to autumn. They are usually stored in cold stores. That’s why we can buy crisp, fresh apples all year round.
What do the biologists say about our apples?
For biologists, apples are a genus of plants. There are about fifty different types. We grow various wild apples that are smaller and hard. That’s why they were also called “crab apples”. Some types of ornamental apples with small fruits come from Asia. You can’t eat them, but they look pretty.
The apples as we know them today all come from the same species, namely the cultivated apple. There are many different varieties of it today. They were bred, they didn’t develop by themselves. If you then multiply them, these fruit trees are all the same. That’s how you buy them in a specialty store.