Strange Beauty

Well, in the eye of the beholder, perhaps

This odd, and sometimes frustrating, year keeps throwing up oddities. We picked the Bramley's 10 days ago, or so. We meticulously triaged between (a) good enough to keep/give away (b) bruised, damaged or worm invaded, but good enough to use immediately (c) compost. Category a should be good enough to keep for weeks or months, as we have in the past. There is always the odd one that we put in the 'perfect' pile, where we have missed something, and it begins to oxidise, go brown and slowly rot. If you are alert and take them out promptly, the 'one bad apple' does not affect the rest (If you are the Metropolitan Police, however... no, let's not go there) 

These have all come out of the 'perfect' box, which I inspected less than a week ago and removed several similar ones then. This rot is nothing like the normal slow spread of discolouration through the apple that we usually get. I've seen it before, but never in such a high proportion of carefully graded apples. It is 'brown rot' - not very poetic - Monilinia fructigena, a fungus. It notoriously turns apples, and other fruit, from apparently perfect to rotted through within days. 

A quick scan of its biology reveals it to be a very complex organism that has no less than three methods of reproduction: the asexual spores that you see here, a sexual spore that can develop after the winter, when the fruit has fallen, and a third type, also sexual, that can be released from the remnant of the apple core, after the flesh has rotted away. Intriguing, but it does not explain why the fungus is so active this year

It has, however, spurred us into action to exploit whatever we have left. A further four crumbles loaded into the freezer today. Beautiful