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Mark 4:1-9, 26-29 (New Living Translation) 1 Once again Jesus began teaching by the lakeshore. A very large crowd soon gathered around him, so he got into a boat. Then he sat in the boat while all the people remained on the shore. 2 He taught them by telling many stories in the form of parables, such as this one: 3 “Listen! A farmer went out to plant some seed. 4 As he scattered it across his field, some of the seed fell on a footpath, and the birds came and ate it. 5 Other seed fell on shallow soil...

PORTLAND, Ore. — A team of retirees who scour the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct — the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the nonprofit Lost Apple Project. The Vietnam veteran and former FBI agent who make up the nonprofit recently learned of their tally from last fall’s apple sleuthing from expert botanists at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon, where all the apples are sent for study and identification. The apples positively identified as previously “lost” were...

There's never been a better time to eat — and cook with — American apple varieties.One day in 2004, Brooke Hazen noticed something unusual about one of his Golden Delicious apple trees. “Some people are lucky enough in their career to have their own bud mutation variety that they get to name,” says Hazen. “Out of the thousands of trees I have, one branch on one tree decided to do its own thing.” What it did was yield an apple with the typical green-yellow skin but an unusual pink patch where it faced the sun and a sweetness and fragrance...

Multimedia: Making apple cider(please enable pop-ups to see the gallery)Doris Heddy remembers when apple cider was the drink of choice each autumn.  Years ago, it was the most popular drink, but now there are choices that are unbelievable," she said, referring to an ever-growing soda and bottled water market.  Heddy owns Van Duyne's Cider Mill in Montville, the remnants of a large farm that dates back to the late 18th century. Every year, from late September until April, she sells thousands of gallons of fresh apple cider, pressed from apples trucked in from Mellick's Orchard in Oldwick.  "Doris has a...

Apple Howling or 'wassailing' is an ancient custom in which the 'evil' spirits are driven out and the 'good' spirits are encouraged to produce a good apple crop for the following year's cider. The Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men revived this tradition in the area over 45 years ago and it has become an essential part of Christmas for many people, especially families with young children, who seem to welcome the opportunity to make as much noise as possible! The ceremony was traditionally held on the eve of Twelfth Night, old Christmas Day, but we have settled on the first Saturday...

FAENZA, Italy - Environmentalists, foodies and travelers, unite! You have nothing to lose but your boring supermarket produce. The Festival of Forgotten Fruits — scheduled for Oct. 14-15 in the town of Casola Valsenio, Italy — is an event designed to bring attention to little-known and sometimes ancient varieties of wild fruit that are still cultivated locally. The festival will feature pomegranates, vulpine pears, rose apples, jujubes (also known as red dates or Chinese dates), quince apples, sorb apples, cornelian cherries and unusual types of berries, as well as medlars, which are used as an ingredient in desserts, jelly and...

AN APPLE A DAY may or may not keep the doctor away, but it's a sentiment shared by just about everyone our Mo Rocca has been visiting: At the Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne, Ind., there's no such thing as a bad apple. There you can indulge in apple dumplings -- a skinless apple wrapped in dough, and deep-fried. Rocca asked, "How healthy is this? "Very healthy -- it's an apple!" he was told Or partake of apple petals ("Better than apple dumplings!" enthused cutthroat vendor Logan Forbing), and sample some apple sausages. Fort Wayne is where John Chapman...

The real life Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in 1774. Trained as a planter and working in Western Pennsylvania and New York, Chapman set out West when the government opened the lands across the Ohio River. He was not a typical settler. While others claimed land for farming or established themselves in frontier towns, Chapman roamed. He would disappear into the wilderness for weeks at a time, clearing land of trees and brush and planting apple seeds in their place. His only company on these expeditions were his seeds, the woods, and wild animals, with whom Chapman claimed to...

Apples originally evolved in the wild to entice ancient megafauna to disperse their seeds; more recently, humans began spreading the trees along the Silk Road with other familiar crops; dispersing the apple trees led to their domestication. Recent archaeological finds of ancient preserved apple seeds across Europe and West Asia combined with historical, paleontological, and recently published genetic data are presenting a fascinating new narrative for one of our most familiar fruits. In this study, Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History traces the history of the apple from its wild origins, noting that...

Using ancient proteins and DNA recovered from tiny pieces of animal bone, archaeologists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (IAET) at the Russian Academy of Sciences-Siberia have discovered evidence that domestic animals -cattle, sheep, and goat - made their way into the high mountain corridors of southern Kyrgyzstan more than four millennia ago... in many of the most important channels of the Silk Road itself, including Kyrgyzstan's Alay Valley (a large mountain corridor linking northwest China with the oases cities of Bukhara and Samarkand), very little is...

Studies of ancient preserved plant remains from a medieval archaeological site in the Pamir Mountains of Uzbekistan have shown that fruits, such as apples, peaches, apricots, and melons, were cultivated in the foothills of Inner Asia. The archaeobotanical study, conducted by Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, is among the first systematic analyses of medieval agricultural crops in the heart of the ancient Silk Road. Spengler identified a rich assemblage of fruit and nut crops, showing that many of the crops we are all familiar with today were cultivated along the ancient trade...

The common ancestor of all the Granny Smiths and Cox's Orange Pippins still grows on some of the world's most beautiful but little known mountainsides in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. The discovery of the "Garden of Eden" in Central Asia has triggered efforts to save what remains of the forests, always known for their abundance of wild fruit. Once under assault by Soviet agricultural planners, they are now menaced by the wealth of oil capitalism and as much as 80 per cent has disappeared. "In earlier historical times there were vast mixed fruit forests across the area," said...

Science traces roots of 'traditional English' apple back to central Asia By Richard Gray, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 25/02/2007 It is a taste of the English countryside, but the origins of the apple lie far from our shady orchards. English apples can be traced back over 7,000 years English apples are direct descendants of fruit trees growing in an inhospitable mountainous region of central Asia, plant scientists at Oxford University have discovered. The DNA of England's famous apple varieties is almost identical to that of fruit found in the Tian Shan forest which lies on the border of...

Pomologists bite off more than they can chew with 200-year-old apple mystery By Richard Savill Last Updated: 2:01am GMT 30/01/2007 The identity of an apple variety that has been growing in Dorset for 200 years has left fruit specialists baffled. For generations, the family of Diana Toms has affectionately referred to the fruit as Granfer's Apple, after her great, great grandfather who planted the tree in 1803. The family has asked pomologists to help establish the cooking apple's identity but they have so far been unable to solve the mystery. Mrs Toms, 83, said: "I am rather pleased it is...

Tocharians The Tocharians were the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity, inhabiting the Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People's Republic of China. Their unique culture spanned from the 1st millennium BCE to the end of the 1st millennium CE. Their language is called Tocharian. Archaeology The Tarim mummies suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have lived in the region of the Tarim Basin from around 1800 BCE until finally they were assimilated by Uyghur Turks in the 9th century CE. "Tocharian donors", possibly the "Knights with...

Chinese archaeologists probe origin of domestic horses through DNA www.chinaview.cn 2006-04-01 15:55:19 BEIJING, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists are studying the DNA samples extracted from the bones of horses unearthed from ancient sites to probe the origin of domestic horses in China. It's still a mystery to archaeologists when and where horses were first tamed in China, said Cai Dawei, a researcher with the center of archaeological research for China's border area under the Jilin University in Northwest China. The DNA research will offer valuable clues on the study of migration, spread and domestication of horses, Cai said. A...