Is Skillcult willing to send apple seeds internationally? You might check and see. If so, you could try buying some of his apple seeds. Any of his open-pollinated mixes might work. He’s trying to breed red-fleshed apples, so he’s bound to have a lot of those in his gene pool. And I believe he’s in zone 9 himself, so they may even be reasonably well-adapted to your winters.
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Yes, he is able to send seeds internationally, but scions are more challenging. Steven mentioned it to me in an email response today. He provided a few contacts in Europe for scions.
Im thinking we could do our own going-to-seed scion exchange?
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That would be a great idea!
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Last year we made apple juice with ambrosia and honeycrisp apples, It is so sweet it is like syrup. Wish I had a nice tart apple to add to it to cut the sweetness. They weren’t too bad for fresh eating. They are local apples so I used them. Not ones that I think I’d grow after trying them
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I was joking with my husband earlier today that I can’t be trusted with a large vehicle and a debit card at this time of year… and two hours later ended up coming home from errands with a new 6’ Dolgo crabapple. 
BUT… now I have another apple upon which to practice grafting using my SkillCult apple seedlings the next couple springs…
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Ha ha ha! Only two hours later! 
Early on in our marriage, I told my husband he was lucky because his wife doesn’t care about clothes, jewelry, or perfume. He said, “Yes, but how many men have to worry about letting their wife loose in a bookstore?”
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Bookstores, craft stores, and during the growing season, garden centers
The first of my SkillCult seeds are coming up, some of them from my second order. The Lady Williams OP babies seem to have just exploded out of their seeds, 8/10 so far… considering a couple of my favorite apples have Lady Williams in their ancestry, I’m thrilled! In a few years I’ll be on my way (hopefully!) to a crisp, balanced flavor, long-hanging apple…
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My Skillcult apple seeds haven’t started sprouting yet, but I’m hoping they will soon. A few days ago, I discovered a cluster of apple sprouts in the area where I sheet composted a bunch of random apple cores, so . . . probably any day now! 
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Which apples do you love that have Lady Williams in their ancestry? Now I’m very curious, and wanting to look into them. I suspect Pink Lady is one of them. What’s the other? (Or are there several more?)
Pink Lady is in fact one of them! More recently I’ve been enjoying Wild Twist, aka Sweet Cheeks. It’s an offspring of Honeycrisp and Cripps Pink/Pink Lady, not nearly as flavorful as either, but the texture is lovely and my most recent bags of them have been super fragrant. We’ve been eating a LOT of them alongside a good sharp cheddar cheese.
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If people here are interested to do that, I think it would make a lot of sense to collaborate with existing scion exchanges. My dream is multi-lingual site that collects data on varieties and provides ways of filtering out locations where it might be difficult to send material. Scions are by their very nature something that more growers can more easily get behind and takes less explanation than a seed grex or modern landrace. In francophone Europe, there’s https://www.fruitiers.org/ which is already amazingly diverse. I’m grafting 50 news varieties of stonefruit, quince, red-fleshed apples, hazelnut and all kinds of stuff this year, just from exchanging with colleagues there. A lower-hanging fruit might be to collaborate with fruitiers to help turn the site more multi-lingual or merge it with North American databases - North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX) has a scion exchange? I think most of them are boomers with crazy collections and just use Facebook.
Apropos, this thread: What if the Landrace Community had a way of swapping seed as effective as this Scion Exchange (based in France)?
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I will sow apple seeds this year too. My plan is to grow them very closely in a seed bed, probably just 5-10 cm apart for their first year. Then dig them up, heel them in for the winter (protected from rodents who love apple bark) and then plant them out with a bit more spacing maybe 30 cm. I wish I could identify disease resistance very early on, then cull the weak ones and from the remaining seedlings I would graft them onto a Frankenstein-tree with lots of varieties.
I’m like most other people, I want to select for intense aroma and disease resistance. For eating apples I do want some sweet-sour balance - I’m across the Atlantic, the trend for sweet apple with no acidity I think of as distinctly American 
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Speaking of Stephen Edholms varieties, if anyone in Europe gets a hold of some of them, please make a note that I would love scion material 
I do have some of the varieties that he’s been using for breeding though, and might have enough material next year to share a few buds, e.g. Grenadine, Chestnut Crab, King David, Pendragon, Pink Pearl, Rubaiyat, Sweet 16, Wickson, William’s Pride.
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Steven did help me get connected with some growers in Europe that have his varieties. I reached out to them. I was a bit too late this season with most of them, with the exception of one grower in Estonia, who I was able to order about a dozen varieties from. Im still waiting to receive those. Any day now. The anticipation is killing me haha.
The varieties I was able to order include:
- Golden Russet
- Ashmeads Kernel
- Gold Rush
- Wickson
- Williams Pride
- Pink Parfait
- Cherub
- Rubiayat
- BITE ME!
- Coxs Orange Pippin
- Hauer Pippin
There are quite a few more that im really hoping to get, but many he won’t have until next year. His list of available cultivars was over 300.
Im also hoping to get Appleoosa, Sweet 16, Grenadine, Chestnut crab, and Pink Pearl from your list.
My hope is to get enough varieties growing and healthy that I no longer need to pay for scions, but rather can trade with others, such as yourself.
One thing I just found out from my mom and dad is that we have some heritage apple varieties growing. They gave me the names “Kraselka”, “Antonowka”, “Zlota Reneta”, and “Kosztela”. The property where they are growing is not being cared for, and is being taken over by forest. This week ill likely be going over there to do some cleaning up in order to help these trees be more productive. If im able to document and identify some of the varieties there, then ill potentially have access to more diversity of good (great?) genetics.
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I recently saw some Sweet 16 apples being sold in a store near here, so of course we bought them to save the seeds. 
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Nice! 
How did they taste, to you?
They weren’t great. They tasted like they’d been stored a while or had been picked late. They were a bit mealy and bland. But I have high hopes in spite of that! 
(Laugh!)
Yeah, I know what you mean. I bought some Opal apples around January 1st, and they were crisp and delicious, with a strong banana aftertaste. I was stoked. I bought some more in late February, and they were mealy and bland, with very little flavor at all. Clearly some apples are best eaten during a particular season!
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My notes about Sweet 16 (via Steven Edholm) say that it varies a lot from apple to apple and from year to year. But also, following your observation, that they get really bad, mealy when overripe. The harvest window is really short. Perfect apple for your garden and not so perfect for mass production and storage in super markets.
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Yep, the way he describes it makes me eager to grow it here and see how well it performs. I was hoping the store apples would give at least some of the good flavor, but it was pretty disappointing. Undeterred, we still saved all the seeds and have started stratifying them.
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