Now summer is finally over, which means, among other things, that the remaining sunscreen that is still in the tube can be put aside for now. Thanks to increasingly hot summers, sunburn is an increasingly common temporary phenomenon, which doesn’t just apply to humans. Fruit growers, for example, complain about the increasing risk of sunburn on apples. Temperatures of more than 30 degrees Celsius cause the fruits, which are hanging in the blazing sun, to heat up immensely. First the peel turns brown, then the fruit temperature inside the apple continues to rise and the tissue even dies. In such cases, experts speak of sunburn necrosis.
An apple like this is no longer crunchy, but commercially available sunscreen doesn’t help either. Fruit growers and hobby gardeners therefore use constant water spraying to cool the fruit or nets to provide shade. Unless you have already switched to sun and heat resistant varieties. The Fuji variety now grows on Lake Constance, for example; previously this would not have been possible in the local climate. The average harvest that fruit growers are talking about this year – whether due to sunburn, hail damage or simply fewer apples that the trees will bear this year – is not necessarily bad news. If there are a lot of fruits hanging on the trees, the high supply quickly spoils the price. Fewer apples and higher prices don’t necessarily make consumers happy, but producers do.
The harvest season continues until the end of October, even though most apple varieties on Lake Constance and up to Franconia now usually grow two weeks earlier and therefore ripen more quickly than before. In any case, the thieves who recently hit an orchard in the Upper Palatinate came just in time. They took 20 kilos of apples, hand-picked from the tree and presumably transported away in several cars. Of course, something like that spoils the price; the operators of the plantation suffered a mid-four-digit amount of damage. Let’s hope that the thieves can’t do anything with some of the apples. Because of sunburn or maybe even sunburn necrosis.