Old thread, I know.
I was just searching for threads on Kerr and this one popped up. You say fruit on your Centennial is larger than your Kerr?
Yes. Centennial larger than Kerr, here. I do no thinning, so both are, perhaps, smaller than in some photos I’ve seen.
Centennial a bit elongate/oval, red-over-yellow, with yellow flesh. Sweet!
Kerr is round, mostly red, with a bloom, and crisp white flesh. More on the tart side, with what I perceive as sort of a ‘musky wine’ undertone.
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Thanks for the reply. I agree with your taste and shape assessments of the two. Kerr runs larger than Centennial here though.
Wonder how big they’d get if I thinned to one fruit per cluster…?
We’ll never know! lol
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I’m jumping on the Kerr train, does anyone have a photo of some that they have grown?, maybe the growth habit of the tree? Cummins makes them look like a good sized clean fruit. I have a bench graft going and I’m years from seeing anything from it but I’m curious to see what us hobbyists have going.
I’ve got Kerr on M26. Over 25 yrs old. Only pruning it’s had in the past 20 years is collection of a few sticks of scionwood for grafting most years. It’s essentially 9 ft tall by 15 ft wide. Bears heavily almost every year. Scab is an issue, but I don’t spray, and still get enough decent fruits for my purposes; i just have to trim out a scab lesion here or there.
IIRC, Kerr is DolgoXHaralson; we like it a lot. It’s fruit is the smallest of any of the edible crabs I grow (except ‘Callaway’, which is really an ornamental crab with large fruits), however.
Had a glass of Kerr crabapple “brandy” just a couple of nights ago…
I fill a half-gallon canning jar with fruits cut into quarters, add a half cup of sugar and fill the jar with the cheapest vodka I can buy. Agitate the jar every so often and 3 months or so down the line you can pour off and drink… but this batch has been in the jar since 2019…
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15’ span is hard for me to fathom. I planted my trees in a grid at 15’ from tree trunk to trunk. My lot presses me to go up more than out. Most are on semi dwarf stock so I’ll be allowing more width in the NS direction so I can keep decent row spacing.
If most of your pruning has been to collect scion wood I should be able to manage with pruning.
Mine is on dwarf stock and still a wee, deer bitten, baby.
Mine was not too unlike yours, when it was planted, back around 1996. My apples were at 20 ft spacings… so… I can still walk, and in some cases, drive our UTV between them, 25 yrs out, but some are approaching a spread such that their outermost branches are nearly touching.
But 15 ft spread… that’s only 7+ ft on either side of the trunk.
I wish I had more space to give them. They will likely touch, or be darned close, in the NS direction. EW I’m hoping to keep 5’ walking rows. It’s less than ideal. My soil is mostly sand and I’m not trellising. Semi seemed to be the way to go for free standing trees. Time will tell…maybe even 25 years worth.