Modernization it’s self helps to spread diseases and pests. Including ones that effect people directly, like mosquitoes and the diseases that they spread. It’s so easy to travel these days.
As far as plant pests, some of them came in delivery crates, maybe even in people’s clothes, and in fruit at a time before fruit got examined before entry in to the country. Even today frozen vegetables from other countries could have pests in them that don’t get seen in an inspection due to the ice hiding it.
Then there are the pests that just make no sense how they are there. Like why are ‘Grape Root Borers’ only in the ‘eastern united states’, is that where they originated from! Grapes are grown pretty much all over the world. I am guessing that there is at least something else that ‘Grape Root Borers’ love to put their young in besides grape roots, something else that is common in ‘eastern united states’, because they survive in the ‘eastern united states’ where there are no grape vines as well.
What do you mean? There a wild grapes vines everywhere littering abandoned lots and forests all over the eastern US. Have you ever walked outside? I literally can’t not seem them walking around of driving
Most of my apples have sooty blotch or CAR for the most part. I ate a very ugly golden delicious and a pink lady today. Ants were starting to work on the bird holes. I have never asked myself ‘is this safe to eat’ because its ugly. I just eat around the imperfections as they are mostly not fully mature trees yet anyways.
Some of my favorite apples are in a bin at my local feed store ‘horse apples’. Mostly Golden Delicous and Fuji I think. They dont spray them. A local farmer just grows them for ‘horse apples’ and makes a few bucks rather than dealing with the perfectionists at the farmers markets.
So yeah i will probably mostly grow Horse apples myself. As long as they taste good im good. The chickens will get whatever doesnt make my cut.
Yes, in many areas in the eastern USA that is true, wild ones where there is not domesticated grapes. Yet in my area I have not seen wild grapes, the closest place with wild grapes must be over a mile away, and the same thing with the closest orchard, over a mile away. I am the only person that I know who has grapes in the area, and my neighbor, I gave him the grapes, and I had the grape varieties first. What I am in shock about is not how they originally got in the area, I am in shock how the survived many years with no grape vines in the area. I am sure this area used to have wild grape vines everywhere. I am wondering if they live in the roots of other vines as well. Like Kudzu is a huge problem in our area, and I’d be shocked if the ‘Grape Root Borers’ could kill ‘Kudzu’ plants, or even make them weak.
Apples are not the only fruit with emerging and increased issues. 20 years ago, there were no issues growing tomatoes and peppers. In 2025, I’m having to spray fungicide on my eggplant and the pepper and tomato growing experience is a complete waste. Tobacco mosaic virus and other blights caused 95 percent failure. Even the once invincible cherry tomatoes struggled this year.
It was not always this way. Nights are warmer, Spring season is full of heat waves which is the primary cause for fire blight. Dew points are higher in the SE foothills at night than they were 20 years ago. There were a couple weeks this past Summer where the grass did not dry up enough to mow for two weeks.
Land use has changed. Not only are we seeing greenhouse gas warming but urban heat island issues are far more severe than initially thought. I live in a small town of 4K and the temps at my home in town and downtown run 4 degrees warmer than areas just .5 mile away.
The late apple explorer Maurice Marshall complained in 2003 that his apple growing endeavors were becoming increasingly challenging in Stokes county NC due to fungus. It has gradually become worse until about 2023 and now things have become exponentially worse for both fungal and blight issues.
I do agree that too much focus on modern apple breeding on feeding the masses and not resilience. That being said, I don’t think there is any hope for happy apple growing in SE. It’s all struggle and frustration.
Grape root borers are a kind of moth, four kinds actually though I think only two species are in the eastern US, which, as you might expect, can fly. At some point, the moths flew in and found your vines.
Funny enough, while we’re both in NC and you have no wild grapes, I’ve got two, potentially three different species of wild grapes just in the treeline along my back yard.
I am glad he can grow " no spray" fruit and get this good looking fruit. Where I am at there is no way I can do a no spray orchard and get decent looking fruit. I was going to take out on of my apple trees this spring but later on in the summer I decided to try, try mind you, to top work this tree to put some different varieties on it. The branch scaffolding is nice and the trunk is decent as well. The fruit on this tree, since I did not spay it, it horrible. Bug bitten and mishapen. Totally useless for anything. I would not even fee these to my animals.
'Starting in 1792, the Ohio Company of Associates made a deal with potential settlers: anyone willing to form a permanent homestead on the wilderness beyond Ohio’s first permanent settlement would be granted 100 acres of land. To prove their homesteads to be permanent, settlers were required to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years, since an average apple tree took roughly ten years to bear fruit. ’
‘It wasn’t that Chapman—or the frontier settlers—didn’t have the knowledge necessary for grafting, but like New Englanders, they found that their effort was better spent planting apples for drinking, not for eating. Apple cider provided those on the frontier with a safe, stable source of drink, and in a time and place where water could be full of dangerous bacteria, cider could be imbibed without worry. Cider was a huge part of frontier life.’
I am familiar with the uses if apples in the past and the history, feed the livestock making apple butter and applesauce, etc. also the uses of cider making back when most of the water was unsafe to drink. That was THE drink for many, many years. When the German immigrants came over they started brewing beer and that took a lot away from cider and apples being used to make cider Then prohibition came into being and many orchards were plowed down and orchards were destroyed and never came back.
I just know in my area there is no way you could get by without spraying. If you or anyone else likes the no spray method and happy with the results that is great. I just know , for me, having fruit like that is useless. Too much work cutting out the bad spots and trying to use the remainder of fruit.
Sometimes when we mess with Mother Nature she slowly retaliates and makes something different to attack our fruit.
AI can indeed be a fantastic tool, but the main application most people are familiar with are the various chatbots (and image generators) that can give the impression of cognition but are actually just sophisticated search engines that respond in normal human language. Once you think about them that way it is easier to understand their strengths and weaknesses. (the key weaknesses being that they are not actually capable of reasoning and are ultimately only regurgitating their source information)
To use a fruit example…
Perplexity.ai is a nice AI because it actually provides sources intended to support its response. It is easy to see that one of the main sources of its fruit knowledge is this messageboard. See for example this query:
You can very likely ask it questions that will result in it sourcing your own posts here.
That makes it a perfectly brilliant search engine, but… garbage in garbage out. Its answers are only going to be as good as the knowledge (and truthfulness) of the people whose posts it is reading. Depending on the subject matter that can be pretty good or… not so great.
It is very cool… particularly since it search across multiple sites and can put results from all of them in one convenient place.
Unfortunately what I expect to happen over time is that the various people who learned to game the existing generation of search engines will adapt their approaches to AI and start creating large volumes of inauthentic posts all over the internet.
Yes. Like Osage Orange is inedible. Some folk eat the seeds raw or roasted. Some even make very interesting wine after finding creative methods to filter the latex out.
All in all Osage Orange is a highly useful plant in many ways. Researchers stopped looking for old wells now and look for Osage Orange to highlight potential settlements to explore.
Credit to Green Dean for rebelling against the AI search untruth.
