I wanted to learn more about this apple, but its name is basically ungooglable. All you get is info on APIs, wind instruments or both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_apple
But with the italian word for 'small' stuck on the end, which seems kinda redundant, since all 'Api' apples are small.
My parents have a couple of Api trees, they're small, very very tart, and quite a firm bite. Now, I like my apples tart and firm, but they're far too much for me; functionally almost like eating crab apples (it seems 'crab apple' is ambiguous, so I mean the European wild apple, aka Malus Sylvestris, here).
unrelated factoid that might be related, but there is an old American folk hero named Johnny Appleseed who walked around the early republic planting apple seeds wherever he went to promote more apples.
then more recently a book came out about apples and it described that apples don't "breed true" so even if you plant the seeds of sweet apples, you probably will not get sweet child trees. But, sour tart apples are still useful for making cider, and turns out alcoholic beverages was Johnny Appleseed's goal.
There are a number of efforts in the US and England, both govt (e.g., USDA) and private, working to preserve these often rare cultivars. One is in Bolton Massachusetts, New England Botanic Garden’s Historic Apple Orchard [0]. They sometimes have to hunt in very obscure places to find just a twig of an old cultivar, bring it back and graft it to a rootstock. They are doing a lot of fascinating DNA analysis and cataloging, and it's a pretty big data management project too, to keep track of who has examples of what cultivars, in what condition, etc..
this had many hits for me.
Not any more! It's the first hit on DDG.
The Smithsonian ?!
I do wonder if the ad-driven digital world is simply going to consume itself.
The Guardian newspaper apparently did an internal study pre-covid and found that 1/3 of its content was essentially unread, and that the effort to SEO / promote that 1/3 not only was wasted effort but actually harmed the results of the other 2/3rds.
Google (or rather PageRank) does try to promote what is well read and referenced, but the sludge does drag down everything.