I see apples and apples and apples and apples

and I think to myself, oh look there's an apple.....

As Louis Armstrong would've sung if he'd spent the day with me.

These apples are called "Grauerhord" and were developed in our neighbouring Canton Thurgau in 1879. They are very small *has nervous breakdown* and very hard to find in the long grass. The grass is too long because the weather has been pretty perfect for grass growing recently. It's also been pretty good for apples this year so we have a bumper crop. Today we moved from a very large variety called Schnyder to these little buggers.
There are many, many varieties of apple to be found in Switzerland, many of them developed here though some are, of course international. Apples originate on the border between Kazakhstan and China, where one can find amazing apple forests - totally wild ancesters that do what they like. It's my dream to go there one day and I would also love to run a project to protect the forests too as they are a massive genetic resource for apple producers all over the world - many of the apples are resistant to disease and have qualities that would be great to breed back into our modern varieties.
Apples were further developed in mountainous areas such as the Alps and the Carpathian mountains, which are often seen as secondary genetic birthplaces for many agricultural varieties, not just apples. And, of course, the apple was developed further in the New World and behind the Iron Curtain.
In order to motivate my children a bit to pick up tiny apples from wet, slug-filled grass in the half-dark...I told them about the generations of their ancestors who have picked apples - possibly even the same little buggers as their grandmother comes from a farm in the Thurgau and I played them some music that they like to add a bit of weight to my argument.