I am looking to plant a few apple trees in hot and humid 7b in coastal Virginia. My Grimes Golden tree passed on due to old age. Going to replace that and also looking for something with the sweet and spicy taste similar to GG but would be a long keeper. Any recommendations?
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Suncrisp and Hawaii are good. They also generally do pretty well in hot and humid. Though this year my Hawaiis rotted pretty badly … not the usual. Lots more rotted this year than the usual for some reason.
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My Cortland is best in class for baking and a superb keeper. I store in my garage over winter and most last until late Feb.
worth considering
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Suncrisp tasted pretty good last year at an orchard I stopped by. But they had picked it too soon so it wasn’t as good as descriptions said. I should go back and see if they have riper ones this year.
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You could try GoldRush.
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Hooples Antique Gold?
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That’s gonna be tough, as GG has a pretty unique flavor. Sinta has some of it, but isn’t a long keeper, either. Winter Gem might be a candidate, but it’s obscure and I haven’t had an opportunity to try it yet. You might consider Rubinette, a fine GG descendent. And as @mroot suggested, GoldRush is a great keeper with some GG heritage.
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Isn’t GG a long keeper? Why wouldn’t you just replace it with another GG if you liked it so much? What are the downsides of you GG that you possibly would not just get another GG? Just curious since I see a lot of people liking the GG.
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In my original post I said I was going to replace it which I meant with another GG. But I find GG doesn’t keep as long as I like so I was looking to add another variety in the GD family.
Grimes ripens late September for me and I don’t like picking underripe apples to store. So a better keeper or a later variety would be good for me.
We had one tree when I was growing up that was huge. I replaced that with an unknown semi dwarf rootstock and it didn’t live very long. Then I replaced it with m111 and it has died after many years.
I appreciate all the suggestions and some of those are growing in orchards here in VA so that I can try them before ordering a few different trees for myself.
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Goldrush is one that truly fills the bill more than any suggestions I’ve seen here that I have experience with. It is relatively resistant to insects but a magnet for summer fungus, cedar apple rust and Marsonnina leaf blotch. A couple of spring and then summer sprays with the right materials can adequately deal with those, if you don’t need pristine apples.
I expect GG is also susceptible to MLB, so if it didn’t show up in your tree maybe it’s not a problem there… yet.
Goldrush has a reputation for tartness, but by about Dec it’s pretty balanced between acid and sugar and can become almost like Golden Delicious by early spring, only it maintains its firmness better. The only problem in storage is that it dehydrates more rapidly than other apples and needs to be protected by plastic with a few holes, or it becomes very ugly and slightly less palatable due to extreme wrinkling of the skin…
The best keeper I grow is Pink Lady which, like Goldrush, is a precocious bearer and an easy to manage tree… at least in my NY location. It has a skin that protects against dehydration, unlike GR.
My own orchard is in a “dew pocket” and is especially prone to fungus problems, but it certainly has different weather than down in your part of the country.
Incidentally, to my palate, GR is superior to GG… it obtains substantially higher brix that is balanced by a lot of acid and is also crunchier. Truly a world class apple according to most who have tasted it fully ripe, and it should always fully ripen in your climate.
I believe GR has much better keeping qualities than Suncrisp, which, IME, becomes pretty bland by about mid-winter. It is also seems even more prone to biennial production than GR. GR I can manage.
If you plant GR I recommend a relatively vigorous rootstock. It focuses on fruit production over wood production- in other words, it’s pretty self dwarfing.
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JonaGrimes would be the next step.
If you want to grow something different the spur type Golden Delicious looks fun.
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Had first rot here ever this year- high percentage of Belle de Boskoop ruined. Wondered if it was due to my bagging but maybe not.
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I’m with Alan: GoldRush is a gold mine. I kept my first crop in plastic bags loosely tied in the fridge. They topped out at 16 Brix through May without wrinkling. Great flavor, consistency, not overlarge which I like. Use Bud118 or, if you prefer, MM111 for stocks, or Gen890 if you need a small tree. GR is a natural semi-dwarf. Blooms mid-season, frost tolerant bloom, sets fine crotch angles in scaffolds with little guidance.
Wish I had known about it when I began this venture.
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I have had a fair amount of rot despite my use of indar. This is just a fraction and much of the rot not in view. Red Delicious were beautiful except for random pea sized black spots across most. Perhaps I missed some late sprays. I got behind recently.
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I wonder if Indar is not the best for apple rots. Nearly all stone fruit rots this summer were at bug entry points (often fruit flies). So it was one of my best years for stone fruit rot. Apple rots … one of the worst years.
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I planted a Grimes Golden when I first moved in. It is in the absolute worst place in my yard and this year it has finally set a few fruit (about a dozen).
What indicators do you specifically see to decide when to start picking?
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Rather than being uniformly green, ripe GG may be pale yellow or a mottled light green/white-ish color with more yellow on the sunny side. They often drop when ripe, so check for drops frequently around this time of year.
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I agree with others that goldrush would work well for you. I’m in 7b/8a Alabama with major heat and humidity and it puts out a nice crop every year. Around here the flavor has a lot less zing that the GR I’ve had from mountain areas of NC and farther north, but still a very good tasting apple. The main problem for me is that nearly every GR apple will get bitter rot if I don’t bag each apple or spray the tree. The good news is that I have found that four sprays of Bonide Fruit Tree and Plant Guard, which contains the fungicide with trade name Pristine, applied one month apart beginning in mid may nearly eliminate all rot. After dabbling last year with both bags and spray, this is the first year I have swithed over totally from bagging to spraying. I’ve had a half dozen rotters out of about 250 apples. And june-august was extremely wet here. Also I would second its dwarfing nature. I have one on G30 that is 10 yrs old and about 10 ft tall and 10 ft across. It does not put out much vigorous growth but instead flowers and fruits like crazy every year for me. Nice big apples.
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I was hoping someone could comment on their most successful fungicide for late season apple rots.
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I think Captan has fairly good effectiveness for Summer rots. I commonly use a mixture of Captan and Indar for most sprays. You need to be careful to use acidic water with Captan as it breaks down quickly in basic water.
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