What kinds of apple varieties would excite you?

General Discussions
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I believe this was on elizapples | unconventional stories from an apple farmer. I distinctly remember reading something similar. Since I don’t drink alcohol and am not at all fond of the taste of hard cider, I didn`t draw the same conclusions from it as she did!

Anecdotally, many professional fruit growers admit freely that they liked the old varieties grown on standard rootstock much better than if they try to grow them on M9. If this means that apples always taste better on Standard I don’t know, after all, the old varieties were selected on Standard, while the new/modern varieties are selected on weak rootstock from the start.

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I am doing something similar, but I also select for good rootstock parameters so my spitters may become an unlimited rootstock, so I am not necessarily culling all trees that produce spitters.

Maarten

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Ooh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know about the reason or the effects of training them to be horizontal or lower. I’ll have to find that book and read it! Thank you!

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Found it! Rootstocks: Do they impact flavor? | unconventional stories from an apple farmer

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Great, thank you!

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Here it is! I found the post in an older thread that I made that mentioned the video. :slight_smile:

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27

Going to Seed mixes for fruit trees would be really cool! If we eventually do those, I think apples would be an obvious no-brainer.

Given the fact that many people strongly prefer lots of sourness and many people strongly prefer little or none, maybe separate Sweet Mix and Sour Mix packets? I think that may be a good idea, just like having separate sweet and spicy mixes for peppers. There are two distinctly different goals that are very common. I wouldn’t want to plant seeds from a McIntosh apple, for instance, but my mom would.

One advantage of saving seeds from fruit trees is that it’s really easy to select for deliciousness when you’re saving seeds from a fruit. After you’ve eaten something delicious, the seeds are just there, begging to be planted!

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28

I did that with an Autumn Glory apple recently. It was the ideal for its variety… sweet, and with a very strong fall spice/cider taste to it. I usually want some tart to balance out the sweet in a fresh-eating apple, but it was SO GOOD anyway that I stuck the seeds in a bag of moist coco coir to sprout them. Now I have three gorgeous seedlings a few inches tall on one of my seed-starting shelves.

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I’m very much in the ‘gimme all the sweetness’ camp. Though wanting to make ciders and such would probably mean I’d have to have some tart apples too. :upside_down_face:

Okay, then I’ll start gathering apples from all the nearby places I can find and plant them, and maybe in ten years or so we can start swapping them. :laughing:

Or if there’s interest for others to grow them but they don’t have a large source nearby, I’d be willing to gather and send what I can find.

I saw a tree yesterday while out running errands that still had apples hanging on it. I tried to get hubs to turn around to get some, but he was in ‘get home now’ mode. :sweat_smile:

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30

Your description of Autumn Glory sounds delicious! I don’t think I’ve ever had an apple that tasted spiced. So cool!

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31

Yes, that sounds amazing!

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32

I think this is a great idea. I for one want things to grow that I can’t get at the grocery, local orchards or that neighbors have. I want new to me and exciting. I am just starting my orchard this year and will be a several year endeavor. I am planting Toka and Black Ice plums and Precious Apricot. 2 apples and a peach next year, 2 cherries and another apricot the next year etc. Apples I am considering at this time are Duchess of Oldenburg, Famusse, Arkansas black, Ashmeads Kernel and 2 more completely undecided yet. so surprise seeds that have some tartness and can hold up in canning would be super.

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33

It’s so fun to find out what other people want! Especially when it’s something I don’t (like tartness). That helps me know what to keep an eye out for to share with other people! I don’t want to cull the next Granny Smith if someone else might enjoy it, and I probably would if I were only thinking about myself. :wink:

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34

You can only eat so many apples, so if you are primarily growing them for your family’s consumption, and not selling them, you will have more apples than can be eaten. The rest have to be preserved in some way, either sauced, baked, juiced, dried, or fermented, or maybe something else, but for sauce, baking, drying, and cidering, I think the tartness is a desirable trait. Certainly a pie with sweet apples is bland, but one with tartness is interesting. If apples are sour but not sweet, you can always sweeten with sugar (or a natural sugary substance, for those who avoid refined sugar).

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35

I have found that my family can go through fresh apples pretty quickly! As in, I can buy 30 apples at the grocery store and have them all vanish in under a week. I bought 25 on Monday, and it’s Thursday, and the last one just got eaten today. (Laugh.)

Last year, a neighbor brought us about 400 apples from his tree. I dehydrated about half of them. The other half were eaten within six weeks.

I’ve steam canned apple sauce and apple slices before, and what I’ve discovered is that we rarely get around to eating cooked fruit. Fresh or dried, though, we’ll consume fast.

My mom says the same thing about tartness being an important component of flavor in apple pie! I’ve found that I disagree – sweet apples with little or no tartness taste immensely superior, and require less sugar on top of it, which makes the apple pie healthier to eat.

As for dried apples, I believe the absolute best variety for those is Red Delicious. It’s not even a close race. Red Delicious has a spectacularly delicious flavor unlike anything else out there, and its unfortunate tendency to be mealy sometimes (sighhhhh) is no problem at all when dehydrating them. Any mealy Red Delicious apples I buy go straight into the dehydrator. I know they’ll taste amazing when they come out.

Meanwhile, tart apples taste unpalatable to me in any contexts. Nobody in my family, including me, wants to eat them fresh, dried, or cooked.

My husband and toddler seem to like apples that are equally tart and sweet (Honeycrisp, for example), but they’re both perfectly happy to eat apples that are entirely sweet. The rest of my kids prefer apples that are entirely sweet, as do I.

To me, there are no advantages to tartness except that it’s essential for steam canning. I don’t need acid to help perserve dried fruit because our humidity level is usually 0%. And it tastes so much better without it!

Meanwhile, my mom’s favorite varieties are Jonathan, McIntosh, and Granny Smith. Clearly we have opposite tastes! :wink:

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You’re very right to bring up the concern about there being too many apples to eat all at once. That’s why I’m super excited to grow a wide range of varieties that ripen across the entire stretch of June through February. I’m also excited to have storage apples (like Arkansas Black) that stay fresh on a shelf without refrigeration for many months.

I figure with a combination of many different ripening times and many varieties with long storage times, we can eat a trickle of about 30-50 apples per week, every week of the year, and rarely have a huge deluge that needs to be dehydrated for later.

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37

Well, I guess if we all had the same tastes, we wouldn’t need thousands of varieties of fruits and the world would be much less interesting.

Yes, storage apples are a must. That helps solve the problem of having too many apples to eat all at once. Every home forest garden / orchard should have some good keepers! I’ve been interested in Arkansas black, and we bought some last fall, but they got eaten before I could confirm their keeping qualities. :slight_smile:

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38

Agreed! The world is so much more fun with loads of people who have different preferences and opinions. :blush:

Gold Rush may be a variety that would interest you! It’s supposed to be a good storage apple, as well. I keep considering getting it because of that, but it sounds a little too tart for my taste. :wink: Maybe it would be perfect for you?

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39

Skillcult put up some scion for auction. Also he has scion available in his webstore.

This video was uploaded about an hour ago.

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40

My objective is to grow my own apples. I suppose I am not in that stage yet to be able to select characteristics, as I am struggling to grow apple trees.

I really looking forward to plant or graft some pink flesh apples. But anything is fine.

I suppose my favorite apples are those that produce seeds, and they are able to grow a next generation of trees and not to depend of grafting branches to get a good apple.

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