A few pictures (apologies for the not so great image quality):
Adams Pearmain
Gray Pearmain
Kidd’s Orange Red
Mother
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How do they taste?
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Good question, Mike.
Adams Pearmain has been one of my favorite apples from our trees. Rich taste, intense but well-balanced sweet-tart. At the stage where I’ve typically been picking them, they have a flavor that reminds me of a really intense orange. Texture is fairly hard and more breaking than crunching crisp.
Gray Pearmain has been really good this year, at least to my taste. Kind of in the same flavor family as AP, with a citrus-y thing going on, but sharper - more lemony than orangey. Very intense flavor, and quite hard with a snapping break. With some of the ones that have on the tree a little longer, the flavor mellows a bit and develops a kind of buttery thing in the background, kind of like lemon cake. Early indications are that they sweeten in storage, and my sense is that they are the kind of apple that will eventually get rubbery, rather than breaking down and becoming mealy.
We’ve only gotten a couple of KORs, but they’ve been a really nice enjoyable apple, probably the most popular one across the family. Well-balanced, harmonious flavor: sweet, but with a little tart in the background, subtle hint of vanilla. Juicier and a little less hard than the two above, but still nice and firm and crisp. Everything just comes together in a really appealing way.
Mother has a reputation for being variable, and that’s been true for us. It’s a relatively mild and at the same time complex apple. When everything comes together, it can be really delightful, with a smooth sweetness that reminds me somehow of cream soda, and an unusual feeling of being cool in the mouth. However, it often turns out a little milder than I’d like it to be, and the complex mix of flavors doesn’t always come together - it can be like listening to a chord where someone dropped a note. Most are still pleasant, but only a minority are really excellent. It also seems to be more finicky in terms of the picking window. Less mother and more diva, you might say.
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Very good apple reviews. Thank you.
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Esopus Spitzenburg fell off in my hand today. It’s a young multi-graft tree that was not sprayed at all this year.
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It’s a cider apple, but I ate one any way. Pretty intense. Lot’s of sugar underneath big time bitterness and astringency.
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How’s the disease resistance & vigor? I was thinking about using one as the structural piece of a frankentree down the line.
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Steven,
Franklin may be a good cider apple. It won’t win any beauty contest this year, I think 
I don’t intentionally grow any apple for cider. Too busy to make cider. Maybe, in a few years.
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Mine is on bud 9 or some similar dwarfing rootstock and also in a bad location, so I’m not really sure how well the tree would do as a structural piece of a frankentree. Of the trees I have in good locations, Hooples Antique Gold has been a great anchor for multi-grafting. Excellent disease resistance, good branch angles and spacing, and a reliable producer of some of my favorite fruits as well.
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Me too. I always have way more going on than I can actually keep up with. Some day…
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The location that I’d be putting mine is not great either. That’s part of why I think I need something super robust as the main scaffold. Losing grafts of decent varieties because the host is weak sucks. I’ll have to think about the Hooples. It gets pretty high marks from the folks in this forum.
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For my group, the clear winner was the Drippin Honey Asian pear, followed by Old Fashioned Limbertwig.
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Crimson Crisp.
Couple just felt straight into the netting.
“CrimsonCrisp has a long harvest season - about a month - and it holds well to the tree” - we shall see.
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A few pics of trees with more than few apples.
Arkansas black
Korean giant, grocery store version in my hand
Golden delicious
Summer banana
Ambrosia
Super sweet, tasted like cotton candy.
Brix 15. I would have guessed higher. Almost too sweet for me and that’s saying something.
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Four of five Twenty Ounce came easily to hand today, will try the last one in a couple weeks. As is often the case, debut samples not large. I kept footies on them throughout this season; washed their faces for the camera. Ate one today at lunch: still 10 Brix, all seeds dark brown, quite hard and lacking distinctive apple taste which came after a few weeks storage with the bagful I bought in late September of 2020 grown elsewhere. Will give one a try in pie soon.
Still, a good beginning.
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Too many of this this year.
Bitter rot is rampant this year.
What an apt name!! It’s rot and I am bitter.
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At least it is not only my apples 
. I was suspecting that my apples are getting these rots because I am a rookie apple grower and selected diseased susceptible varieties…
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I selected the apple varieties that I like, thinking my relatively low spray program that has worked well for several years would work this year.
It ain’t so 
.
Bitter rot has been really pervasive this year. Marrsonina Leaf Blotch has not been well-controlled.
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