Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

newengland.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 257 posts

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#171

Post by ljm »

I haven't seen red delicious on sale in UK supermarkets for ages. I used to back in my childhood, when you had a variety of loose apples on sale. We bought red delicious and golden delicious because they were cheaper, and we got granny smith apples as a treat. I liked red more than golden for reasons I don't remember but I think red had a stronger crunch and a thicker skin.

I really don't like over-sweet fruit and it feels like a lot of fruits have been engineered for extra sweetness. So these days I try and stick to boring/milder stuff like Braeburn or Gala. Even for other fruits, like strawberries, it's hard to find a punnet that isn't the 'supersweet' variety.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#172

Post by quesera »

dylan604 wrote: post #169
quesera wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you're right that it doesn't scale down to single pots. When I grew tomatoes in containers, I went for the 5-gal buckets from Lowes ($4), and bought soil in larger bags. Also your cage is more expensive than I recall paying. On the plus side, most of those are one-time startup costs. Our tomatoes are self-seeding at this point. We literally do nothing except pick them, and put away several dozen jars of sauce ev…

My original post said ~$50-$100 in initial setup, so you're not being fair to my original post. You need multiples of the things or similarly functioning things as posted. Yes, buying bigger bags of dirt is an option, or cheap plastic pots. If you're going to be doing this, you'll appreciate the clay pots as they don't bet brittle from UV exposure. I prefer clay as I just dislike plastic. It's a typical reaction when…

Well to be fair to my unfairness to your original post, you'll also get a lot more than $5 of produce out of a single pot.

So, per pot, you'll spend $20 in the first year by my (updated) math, then $5-10 each successive year -- and you'll get about $15 of produce each season. Sometimes much more than $15. Cherry/grape tomatoes are expensive, and the plants are more fruitful than the larger varieties.

Drip irrigation is out of scope. A minute or two, per container, per day, with a hose (or watering can) while you check for hornworms is the operational expectation.

Anyway I don't disagree with your larger point. Little things definitely add up. I've been to IKEA!

I also dislike plastic, but I liked the form factor of the bucket (straight vertical sides) to pack multiples into a small space. I still have the buckets 15 years later, and I use them for all sorts of misc jobs around the garden.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#173

Post by autokad »

mcv wrote: post #71

As a kid, I was a fan of Golden Delicious, while others criticised it for being too mealy. That wasn't my experience, at least at first. Eventually I encountered increasingly mealy Golden "Delicious", and started favouring other apples. Even the cheapest apples here, like Elstar and Jonagold, are pretty good in comparison. I wonder if it's the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. If you…

> "aren't you more likely to pick the tastier looking one?"

I have always looked for the more multi colored ones, skipping the all red because they had a history of tasting less delicious.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#174

Post by mastazi »

I was lucky that I could grow up in a family where we produced most of the food we ate[1]. The main thing I learned, is that the interests of food consumers and food producers are, and always will be, misaligned, unless you are the one producing the food you eat.

When I was a kid, I used to despise supermarket food (I later learned to eat it out of necessity, once I moved out of my parent's place).

Now I'm saving up so I can buy a homestead when I retire, and my dream is to produce food for me and my loved ones.

[1] I grew up on a small farm and homestead in Italy, my grandparents and parents had a few money crops (olive oil, wine, eggs) and everything else on the farm was for our own consumption (veggie garden, orchard, meat chickens, pigs, rabbits etc.).

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#175

Post by loonster »

dylan604 wrote: post #162
quesera wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50-100 is way overestimated. You can grow tomatoes in inexpensive pots. Seedlings are inexpensive. Maybe $15 total, plus water, time, and patience. The latter two of those can be expensive, but difficult to quantify.

Tomatoes get big. They need a decent sized pot. I would recommend a 12" pot, defintely no smaller than 10".[0] Dirt aint cheap. "Cheap as dirt" wasn't formed from shopping at garden centers with bagged dirt, and you don't need a truck load for container gardening.[1] Tomoatoes need up right supports like cages, etc.[2] Seedlings are cheap individually, but each one needs a container.[3] [0] $10 https://www.homedepot.…

Need to add a fence to your list or a large enough garden to withstand losses.

This was our first garden year. Very small plot, around 6'x6'. Deer knocked over our two tomato plants and ate every tomato off. Huge green tomatoes.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#176

Post by jbluepolarbear »

krupan wrote: post #133
jbluepolarbear wrote: post #3

There are Apple orchards that were abandoned in Washington State that my dad use to to take us to. These orchards had only red delicious and they were the best apples I’ve had. There are a lot of abandoned orchards around Washington and old species keep getting found.

Where in WA?

The ones I went to were near Okanogan Valley; though some could have been in Canada as well.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#178

Post by quesera »

loonster wrote: post #175
dylan604 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tomatoes get big. They need a decent sized pot. I would recommend a 12" pot, defintely no smaller than 10".[0] Dirt aint cheap. "Cheap as dirt" wasn't formed from shopping at garden centers with bagged dirt, and you don't need a truck load for container gardening.[1] Tomoatoes need up right supports like cages, etc.[2] Seedlings are cheap individually, but each one needs a container.[3] [0] $10 https://www.homedepot.…

Need to add a fence to your list or a large enough garden to withstand losses. This was our first garden year. Very small plot, around 6'x6'. Deer knocked over our two tomato plants and ate every tomato off. Huge green tomatoes.

True. If it's not the deer (rural, suburban), it's the rats (urban).

Container gardening on a (south-facing) high rise balcony works pretty well, though.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#179

Post by pbhjpbhj »

koyote wrote: post #24

I think it's quite interesting that it's taken so long for a lackluster tasting food to decline in popularity. When I moved to the US from Western Europe, the relative difference in food quality was quite apparent and I distinctly remember noticing this first with the apples: At first I thought I might have chosen a bad batch, but after a couple of more buys I realised that these apples looked 'perfect' but always ta…

>I know a lot of Americans that do not like apples because all they've ever had were the foamy ones.

We have started getting apples in the UK (Tesco) that are often "foamy", almost powdery in their consistency. I assumed that it was some growing method that produces it as the same variety sold under the same label will sometimes have it and sometime not. I wondered if they're really old apples that the appearance of has been preserved; like we get softer potatoes that are actually last seasons and often have green patches where roots have been cut off. We changed to buying from Lidl and their fruit doesn't seem to have the same issue, so far, YMMV. The kids will squeeze the apples to make sure they're the nice ones, and one claims he can smell the good ones; visually they're identical (to me).

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#180

Post by LAC-Tech »

jareklupinski wrote: post #67
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly nobody under the age of 35 is aware that popcorn used to taste like corn. Not like modern ears of corn, which are bred mostly for sweetness; more like tortilla chips, whose corn is still (somehow) cultivated for corn flavor. Corny. [edit] … also I’m baffled by how, every time I “hold the tomatoes” on my burger or salad, someone will invariably say “don’t you like tomatoes?” and I have to go on this dumb rant a…

i too stopped ordering tomatos for this reason some people mentioned looking for places that advertise using heirloom tomatos, but you still have to give them a good pinch of salt would love to join a startup that re-engineers flavor back into commercially-viable crops

I've actually thought about this before. AFAICT, it's mostly a supply chain issue.

In order to ship fruit long distance, they're harvested before they're ready, and artificially ripened in frozen containers. This lets them survive long journeys but kills a lot of the taste.

So your company would end up being a traceability and logistics one - what's the nearest place to your customers that grow fruit, how can you prove it, and how can you get it in their hands.

(Last two contracts were in artificial fruit ripening and supply chain traceability respectively).

Post reply on HN