Sounds very interesting. I’ll probably let you do those columnar crosses to get a dessert columnar apple / red flesh. I’m too invested in 40 red fleshed and 100 other apples, giving me 4000 cross possibilities, times up to 8 or more seeds per one apple crossed.
There’s room for more than one person doing this sort of thing!
BB
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I hope to get Mere Pippin going this year. From Nigel Deacon’s description & preliminary photo it appears to be a columnar tree. Or it has the potential habit if pruned accordingly.
Skillcult had something to do with its introduction to the States & is my scion source. He seeks (from what I gather in his taste tests on YouTube) something that hangs onto the tree long after ripening & likable eaten from the tree. Mere doesn’t seem to have that feature. Nigel wrote me to say he waits until March before eating any, after he has run through the others that cannot keep as long. By then it is no longer terribly hard (like Gold Rush, maybe) and not so sharp. Sounds good to me, so I hope to get a graft or two going.
In the meantime, my son-in-law wants to grow two columnar apples. Some of the catalog descriptions say 8 or 9 feet tall, even on MM106. They sound like semi-dwarf at best for size. Is that your (you all’s) experience?
Also, to re-state the questions at the top of this thread, any strengths or downsides I should pass on to him, besides the tutorial for pruning it to grow upward?
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That sounds like an apple worth trying! Neither COP or CPP are candidates for growing in my neck of the woods, but Wijcik McIntosh was found north of me in British Columbia, if memory serves.
I saw an old columnar specimen in a Seattle yard that had grown quite large with many branches. Still it was probably more compact than the average unpruned apple of similar age.
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