Ginger Gold!
Carolina Red June!
Rubinette!
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Do you have Lord Lambourne? Just curious of your experience with it.
I don’t have Lord Lambourne, it looks like an interesting apple. There are a few new English varieties that looks appealing including Cobra.
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And if Honeycrisp does poorly on Gen935, then I would hesitate to put the mother of Honeycrisp, Keepsake on it, too. Might be a family trait. In which case Duchess of Oldenburg might also be safer on something other than Gen935, since D/O figures twice in the family tree of Honeycrisp.
Lots of other options…
Queen Cox is a lovely tree and precocious bearer. Hope you love it! QC cannot endure the near-desert conditions in which I live.
I had LL, loved the fruit. Big, juicy, tasty, a bit of strawberry flavor/aroma, unbelievably precocious and tiny tree which was otherwise trouble free. Must be stripped or its fruitfulness stunts tree growth. Fruit splits in dry heat. Sigh. Just top-worked it this season. Deserves to be better known.
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I believe your saying thin its fruit or don’t let it fruit at all the first few times it tries? I have a brand new graft of it on B118 so just clarifying.
Stephen Hayes turned me onto it, i’m happy I have 1 growing.
applebacon: yes. Lord Lambourne bloomed from the tip the following year after the bench graft had been made. It bloomed from 7 spurs and tips the following year and twice that the next.
The runner-up most precocious cultivars I’ve grown here are Wynoochee and Claygate Pearmain. Both bloomed in their third leaf (this season) and must be stripped of fruit. There will be plenty of years, I hope, to enjoy much more fruit from them as they mature.
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Putting Lord Lambourne onto Bud118 was a good move; it will never be a big tree. I made the mistake of having it grafted to Bud9! After realizing the low vigor times two (30% of low vigor - a midget!) I dug it up and re-planted it with the graft union buried three inches. It is slowly becoming a standard as the scion wood begins rooting. (Top-worked it to Court Pendu Rose, a similarly low vigor tree, which should work out nicely.)
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Thanks NB appreciate the good information!
I got Orleans Reinette graft just breaking bud now that I’m really psyched about as well from another Stephen Hayes video suggestion. I love this stuff!
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Orléans Reinette: I so want to try this. May it do famously for you!
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An excellent apple for me in the high desert, as we’ve discussed, so would likely do well for you. Did I send you a stick this year or last or ever? If not, you know where you can find some when you have room.
It’s a small tree for me, though most likely due to initial watering issues on my part folllowed by heavy deer damage for a couple of years and finally heavy bearing - relative to its size, if not its age - for the past two years. I pruned many of the fruiting spurs out this year and otherwise gave it a nice haircut and it is responding well thus far. It did set five sigh fruits this year, which I will leave on, because a year without Orlean’s Reinette is a year almost not worth living.
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My experience picking and tasting Winesap and Stayman is that Winesap is consistently smaller and possesses twice the flavor and flesh color of Stayman. Here Winesap can keep in cellar until May.
Stayman is nearly as brushy in its crown as Winesap, just need to prune yearly to keep the center opened up.
Much as I like Winesap, the possibilities of others have called to me and taken space in the yard.
I don’t always understand my own actions or motivations, since I know of only one true Winesap in my area…
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Same here - I had Winesap for 5 years but space was getting tight and I removed it. Only last year did I re-add it, after tasting a few at the local farmers market and remembering how much I liked it.
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Japanese beetles have voted and they chose honeycrisp as the best tasting apple. They prefer it over any other fruit I grow.
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That’s really surprising. Here apples are probably the least favorite of Japanese beetles. Well maybe pear would be first but I’ve not seen hardly any JBs on my apples. Here in the mid Atlantic they love Prunus.
They don’t seem to bother my blueberries either. Not sure why.
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Here they seen to like sweet cherry the best, then plums then apples.
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That’s my experience in VA.
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We drive by the only old Winesap tree I know of in the area regularly. When our friends owned it, I thinned the fruit and helped harvest, which they graciously shared with us. Great friends! They sold the place several years ago. It was again sold just in the past few months.
The Winesap tree is gone.
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After watching my Honeycrisp scions I grafted over three years ago leaf out at an unusually late time of the year it is time to minimize it’s space allotment. It appears that we just don’t typically get enough chill hours at my location. Love the honeycrisp taste but I also like some other apples that handles our typical chill hours.
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