Ha ha ha, well, intense flavors and high sugar are definitely things I want! Not high acid, though.
Steven Edholm’s description of this new apple cultivar he bred cracked me up:
https://skillcult.com/hella-kitty
Is that the kind of apple you’re looking for? 
Hella Kitty sounds like my kind of fun apple. Here’s to hoping some of my Wickson OP seeds throw out a few fun relatives…
Hee hee, I hope so too, for your sake!
Me, I’m hoping that my Wickson seeds will give me something more like Hella Kitty’s sister, Cherub. 
After listening to him talk about Sweet 16, I want to take that and cross with King David for a black spiced apple. Mmm
That does sound yummy!
I believe Arkansas Black is supposed to have a bit of a spiced flavor. It’s certainly supposed to be good, and it’s dark:
Might be a cultivar to look for scions of while you’re waiting for your seedlings to fruit.
The description is certainly original and very evocative. Since I haven’t yet found an apple that is too tart for me (apart from not ripe ones, of course) it would be very interesting to taste this apple. The most important thing for me is that a fruit can’t just be one dimensional, so if it has a lot of acid, there have to be some interesting aromas, the same with sweet and skillcults apples definitely seem to fullfill that.
If you have apple trees, he has scion wood available now.
Yes, and I got some! (Rubs hands together and cackles gleefully.) I’m sad that there wasn’t Black Strawberry scionwood available (well, there is, but only in the auctions, which makes them too expensive for my budget), but I’m thrilled that I got some Cherub. I’ve been wanting Cherub really badly ever since I read about it! 
Hopefully I’ll be in a position to be able to use scion wood next year. This year… there’s just too much going on right now and too much uncertainty in my life.
I grafted my very first scions today! 
I think it went well. I tried to follow everything on Skillcult’s apple grafting playlist.
Link to it, in case you want to watch the whole thing to learn it (I highly recommend it!):
I grafted six peach scions and five apple scions. With each one, I used strips of thick plastic bags to wrap the graft, and Elmer’s wood glue (which is apparently almost exactly the same as normal Elmer’s glue) and a paintbrush to paint over the whole scions afterwards, especially the buds and the tops. Hopefully, that will keep in the moisture and help them do well. (Especially the peach scions, which are apparently particularly prone to drying out.)
Some of the scions were thick, and the available branches to graft them on were small, so there may have been a mismatch with cambium layers, so they may fail. But I tried really hard to line them up properly along one side. I also took a cutting from each peach scion and stuck it in partly composted wood chips with some willow water to see if I can get them to root. Having those varieties as trees on their own roots may be great, too.
With all of my scions, I’ve got about eight inches of scionwood to work with, so I’m cutting them in half or in thirds. That means I have less scion after the graft that I have to paint over with wood glue, and even more importantly, I can make multiple grafts of every variety. Hopefully that way, at least one attempt at every variety will take!
I’m not trying anything special: just a regular whip graft. I tried whip and tongue once, decided I was almost certainly going to cut myself if I kept trying it, and decided to just stick with whip, which is easy to do, easy to not cut yourself while doing, and I’ve been told it works most of the time.
Eventually, I’ll learn bud grafting, and that will give me the opportunity to do way more stuff. But for now, I’ll just stick with regular whip grafted scions.
I’m happy that it seems to be as simple and easy to do as the playlist portrays it to be! Yay!
Skillcult Apples are growing!
Chestnut:
King David:
Lady Williams:
Pink Parfait:
Pomo Sanel:
Winter:
Summer didn’t sprout at all, unfortunately. Otherwise, had relatively good germination.
Other random apple varieties we stratified:
The “Downtown Newport” tree:
New London Crab Tree:
Sweet 16:
Well, definitely don’t chuck the soil from the pots that didn’t fully germinate! Those seeds might sprout after a second round of winter stratifying them. I planted about 100 Skillcult apple seeds, and only four germinated, and I get fantastic apple germination rates here normally, so my suspicion is most of them didn’t get stratified enough and will pop up next year.
Yep, those pots will probably stay where they are over the winter to let all the apple babies get a chance to come up again next year. 
Woo hoo! 
I hope you’ll get a 100% germination rate.
