Bloom-when describing the appearance of fruit, a whitish or blue-grey coating, light or heavy, over the skin of the fruit. It is easily rubbed off to show the true skin colors beneath. It acts to make the fruit appear rather dull. It is especially heavy on some fruit such as blue black plums. 'Bloom' is caused by natural yeasts on the surface of the fruit, and is totally harmless.

cordon-a particular shape to prune a fruiting bush or tree into so it fits into a restricted space. The plant is pruned to a single stem, and all fruit are carried on short spurs off that stem. To keep the plant to a single stem, all side shoots are pruned back to 3-4 leaves at the end of summer. Cordons can be grown upright, supported by a permanant stake or tied to horizontal wires stretched along a fence. If they are tied to wires on a fence, they can be tied to a bamboo 'splint' and gradually pulled over until they are growing at 45 degrees. Your cordon is then known as an 'oblique cordon'. Some plants, particularly some apples, make more fruiting spurs if they are grown as oblique cordons. Cordons are useful where you want to grow several different kinds of gooseberry, red currant, or spur type apple, but don't have much space. Growing as a cordon allows you to jam them up side by side, usually in a row. Cordoning a plant also makes it easier to net it against birds. And in the small urban gardens of today, cordons fit perfectly against walls and fences , or in narrow beds by driveways and paths.
 
crackout-'percent crackout'; a term to describe the amount of meat in a nut. The weight of the edible part, the kernel, divided by the total weight of the nut, and expressed as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more kernel you get relative to shell and other bits.
 
cultivar (cv.) = 'cultivated variety', a readily identifiable form of a particular plant, such as the form of the tomato knowwn as 'Big Boy', or the form of the apple plant known as 'gala'. In the case of vegetables, the plant is grown from seed, but to be recognised as a cultivated variety, or cultivar ('cv.' for short) the plants grown from the seed must be typical of the variety, all look the same, and not produce 'off types'. In the case of woody plants such as fruit trees, 'trueness to type' is easy to maintain-the plants are cloned by cuttings, by division, or by grafting or budding.
 
didactic- explaining something in a teaching way, but more than that, in a moralizing and preaching manner.
 
El Nino is a natural cyclical weather phenomenon which occurs when ocean temperatures are warmer than normal. La Nina and El Nino often are spoken of together and termed the El Nino/Southern Oscillations, or "ENSO."
 
Espalier - a way of training fruit trees, usually apples and pears, as a single central stem with  horizontal  fruiting arms off each side. The trees are usually trained hard up against a wall, or along a wire fence. Usually there are two or three layers of arms, about 45cm/18 inches apart. Young trees are cut back to about 50mm/2 inches below the bottom wire. When new growth sprouts below the cut, one is selected to grow straight up as the leader, and two branches are bent down to a 45 degree angle and temporarily held straight with bamboo canes. In winter, the angled branches are pulled down horizontal and tied to the bottom wire. All other branches are removed. This pattern is repeated again at the next wire, and again if there is to be a third wire. At the final and top layer, the horizontals are tied down as before, but no leader is kept.

The advantage of espaliers is that trees can be kept in a small space, more trees can be grown per lineal metre/yard than most other ways, the trees are easier to net against vermin, and heavily laden branches are supported against breaking. The disadvantages are that espaliers against the wall of a house make painting the house marginally more difficult, if that is required; and that regular late summer pruning of vigorous shoots needs to be done.
 
The rootstock for espaliers has to be vigorous, but not too vigorous. MM106 or any other semi dwarfing rootstock is suitable. Very vigorous apple varieties (many 'triploid' varieties come into this category) are better grafted onto a dwarfing rootstock, such as MM9. (They then need to be well mulched and watered, as MM9 has weak roots.) Some apple varieties tend to bear mainly at the tips of shoots (e.g. 'Granny Smith'). These 'tip bearing varieties' are not as suited to espaliering as the more common 'spur fruiting' varieties.
 
La Nina is when  ocean temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific are unusually cold. It is essentially the opposite of the El Nino weather phenomenon .  La Nina sometimes is referred to as the cold phase of the ENSO
 
  hominid-"a scientific term used to refer to an animal classified as a  member of the Family 'Hominidae'. This family includes the genus Australopithecus ('Southern Ape'), now extinct, and the genus Homo ('Man'). All species in the genus Homo are extinct except for one-Homo sapiens ('Wise Man'). This species adaptive advantages of omnivory,  speech, and opposable thumb that can hold and finely manipulate objects has allowed it to change the natural environment it evolved in. Almost all biologically productive ecosystems have been altered by this Hominid's technology to the point  where the 2 million year old lifeway of gathering and hunting is now effectively ended . Homo sapiens evolved physiologically and socially to live in small tribal bands of gatherer-hunters for 2 million years; it is only very recently that the animal has become a dweller in elaborate self constructed artificial colonies known as 'urban conglomerations', or 'cities' . It's urban-industrial lifestyle is now, to greater or lesser extent, in conflict with it's immutable and unchangeable 2 million year old biology."
 
regions of the world - When I have lumped regions into a name, such as 'Central Europe', I have paid more attention to geographic features, and to some extent climate and vegetation,, than I have political/economic or cultural/tribal boundaries. Plants and animals tend to distribute themselves along geographic environments and similar climates and soils, and pay no attention to the human animals lines on a map!

The areas are listed in the order in which we may have colonized as we migrated out of our African homeland. This being written by a European, there is an arbitrary listing of the expansion into Europe first. In fact, it is almost certain that we would have radiated in all directions once we arrived on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. We may have radiated into Asia even earlier - from  Ethiopia across the present day Yemeni straits of the Red sea to the Arabian Peninsula. From the Arabian shoreline to south Asia via the rich Iraqi delta lands and the Iranian and Pakistani coast.

Africa - all countries except the North African countries abutting the Mediterranean coast - in effect, the African continent below the tropic of Cancer (from Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, down to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa).
 
North Africa - 'South Mediterranean' countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt.

Mediterranean East - Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan.

Mediterranean North - Balkans (Bulgaria, Greece, Albania), Dalmatian countries (former Yugoslavia) , Italy, Alps, Southern France and Spain.

Southern Europe - Uplands of central France; the northern slopes of the alps in Switerland, South Germany, and Austria; Czech & Slovakian Republics, to the shores of the Black Sea via Romainia and Bulgaria, the Ukrainian uplands to Khazak SSR on the northern side of the Caspian sea.

Central Europe - Southern Poland and Central Russia to the Ural Mountains.

Northern Europe - from Frances atlantic seabord following the North European plain through Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Lithuanian/Latvian/Estonian/Russian SSR to the Urals. Including the mountains and uplands of Scandanavia, Finland and Lappland.
 
North Asia - East of the Ural Mountains to the Bering sea - the Siberian Plain and Central Plateau, the mountains of Eastern Siberia.
 
South West Asia - Turkey, Georgian/Armenian/Azerbhaijani SSR,  Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

South Asia - Indian and Bangladeshi Plateau and Plains

Central Asia - Himalaya range in all countries, the Hindu Kush in the Kashmiri region, Tadzhikstani/uzbeki/Turkmeni/southern and central Khazaki SSR on the Caspian seas's eastern shore, Tibet, the mountains of Southwest China, China's far western Sinkiang-uigur region, and Mongolia including the Gobi desert filled Inner Mongolia.

East Asia - The great plains of China from the Manchurian Plain to the uplands of Southern China; Korea, Japan.

South East Asia - from the countries on the Southern Chinese border to tropical Australia inclusive.

Pacific Islands - the scattered tropical islands of the Pacific-Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Hawaii, etc

Australasia - Non tropical Australia, New Zealand.
 
The Americas - The totality of the twin Northern and Southern Continents, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
 
North Americas - Canada and USA.

Central Americas - (conventionally, Mexico to Panama) the Southern Americas between the two tropics (tropic of Cancer and tropic of Capricorn) Mexico to Bolivia inclusive (Venezuela, Colombia, Guyana, Surinam, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil); Caribbean Islands.

South Americas - Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil.

tomato, bush-determinate. The plant has an in-built idea of how much it wants to grow. It grows that far, flowers and fruits and more or less stops. This gives a concentrated fruit set and harvest
 
tomato, creating your own variety-tomatoes are self pollinating, so to create a new variety, you have to pull the pollen bearing anthers off a flower of the variety you use as the 'female parent' (so it doesn't fertilise itself in the usual way and spoil your plans), and dust on pollen of a completely different variety (the 'male parent'). Mark the 'doctored' fruit, and when it is ripe, extract the seed. Next year, sow the seed, keep seed from any plant, and in the third year, sow as much seed as possible. This seed will produce plants carrying tomatoes of a fairly wide variety of characteristics. Chose the one you like best, and keep seed. Sow that seed and reselect in the fourth year.Keep doing this until the new variety is both uniform (the tomatoes look identical) and stable('off types' no longer keep appearing). This takes about six years. So in about 8 years you will have a new variety. If it is wonderful, you can patent it. If not, you can name it after your 'significant other' in your life. Or, in the ultimate act of sycophancy, name it after your boss.
 
tomato, determinate-see 'tomato, bush'
 
tomato, F1 hybrid-see 'tomato, hybrid'
 
tomato, hybrid-this is a variety created by deliberately and painstakingly taking pollen from an existing open pollinated tomato and putting it onto a different open pollinated tomato. The seed gives a first generation (F1) that are extremely uniform. But keeping seed and resowing it gives a highly varied and non-uniform lot of plants and fruit. The original cross to create the F1 seed has to be done every year. The advantage of hybrids is vigor, and the ability to use a parent known to be disease resistant.
 
tomato, indeterminate-see 'tomato, staking'
 
tomato, open pollinated-usually, but not always, older varieties that 'come true from seed'. That is, if you keep seed from a tomato and resow it, you will always get the exact tomato that the seed came from. You can create a new variety yourself if you have time and patience.
 
tomato, staking -indeterminate growth pattern.That is, the growing tip and side shoots keep growing and flowering and fruiting until disease and cold weather stop it.
 
tomato, vigorous bush-semi determinate. A tomato that behaves mid way between a determinate and indeterminate tomato.
 
verruccosis - a fungus that affects citrus fruits. It causes unsightly scarring, lumps and spots. It is not a major problem, except for those varieties that are particularly suceptable. The disease can be controlled by spraying with copper sprays at blossom time, if you are concerned.