Nikitskaya Bordovaya is the same as Nikita’s Gift. “Bordovaya” means Bordeaux-colored (wine red or claret red), which is not the same as purple.
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I tasted one last year, it was sweet and tasty with some tomatoey flavours but not in a bad way. It seemed like it would be very nice as jam. I ordered from Kwekerij Arborealis in holland and they were cheap and arrived in good condition. They grow very fast!
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Updated Fruit Map for 2023!
New additions planted this winter in pink:
- Pear Emile D’Heyst (one source says parthenocarpic)
- Pear Doyenne du Comice
- Pear Conference
- Plum Victoria
- Sorbus Burka
- More Sour Cherry Morello (against a wall so I can net them)
- Malus Sylvestris - random volunteer I dug up with beautiful structure and short internodes
- Persimmon Sunrise (mentioned earlier in thread)
- Persimmon Kassandra
My apple nursery has also had a few new local roadside crabs+domestica grafted, and previous things were moved around or relegated to the hedgerow.
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Enjoy hearing your reports from ‘across the pond’.
Keep up the good job! Nice looking ‘half acre’.
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you have quite the collection orchard 
I’m also curious about the Sieversii.
I’m curios if the apple Bakran (ancient apple from Iran) is more closle related to it. I had it fruit last season for the first time. And it is definitely more “wild” than my other apples. Unripe tasted not bitter, bit sour. But it feels like it sucks the moisture from your mouth. Like an uncooked quince does. Ripe it tasted a bit like plums/sour cherry.
It was susceptible to Monilinia though. since your Sieversii is also from a dryer climate. Might be wise to keep an eye out for Monilinia
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Sad news, a baby late frost, no more than like -1C seems to have taken out pretty much this whole tree. There’s one shoot maybe 6" above the graft getting pushed out, but above that the scratch test says it’s dead dead dead. This sucks because the tree had great structure and was already taller than me.
If it can’t handle a -1C late frost, it’s never going to survive. I’m watching it for now as everything comes out of dormancy, and maybe it would get more robust as the years go on, but I’ll almost certainly just replace it.
I still have two clones of a kazakh apple from another source, that has been much more sensible with it’s dormancy and late frost resistance. So it’s not a total loss.
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Things happen…prune/cut an inch or so above the green bud and let it try to recover.
I’ve had several nice trees in pots this spring die back, but after I lopped off a bunch of
the top limbs, they are sprouting out. Sudden cold after being hot is the cause I think.
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The problem is a frost like that is predictable almost every year going forward, and I only have so many spaces for larger trees, it’s in a prime space. If I thought it might get more able to handle this over time, that’d be good, the tree is 2nd or 3rd leaf but was already fairly large on arrival.
Sometimes those are the choices. But, I personally, have a good number of plants that need nursing…and some cannot be easily replaced even if money isn’t a problem.
My guess is there’s other things going on besides -1C
as those trees from Central Asia are very cold hardy. Could have happened to any tree…but picked that one.
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Agreed, sudden freeze after hot days; typical of crappy Kansas spring… 
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Late dormancy apples leaderboard 2023:
#6) Reinette du Mans - Start May
#5) Appletown Wonder - Early May
#4) Court Pendu Plat - Early/Mid May
#3) Crawley Beauty - Mid May
#2) Reinette d’Amorique - Mid/Late May
#1) Belle Fille de Salins - Late May
Belle Fille de Salins almost made it to June before even budding!!! Though she was a goner but kept scratch testing green. Some promising subjects for my breeding project. By and large the french late dormancy guard apples really lived up to their descriptions.
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Primrose and daffodils are out, my quince are leafing out, spring birds are singing a chorus everywhere, and it’s not even two weeks into february.
A lot of trees will be damaged by false spring and late frost again this year I think. My poor little orchard 
This late flowering+dormancy apple project is more needed than ever. Wish I had 5 acres to really get some numbers tested.
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It’s been a very strange and mild winter over here too. Hope your trees pull through.
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The UK and France seem to have more late blooming genetics than in the USA.
Good luck in your project.
Just like Eric the Red used to farm in Greenland, the climate turned colder and the colony died out, so things like an explosion of many large volcanos (or nuclear bombs) could bring us another ice age…and those things seem more likely to me than the rest of the polar ice melting.
Cornish Aromatic is one I’m grafting again. And hopefully, de Flandre.
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It may be pointless.
We don’t have to wait for volcanoes or nuclear bombs, read the articles from this week confirming the AMOC (Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) will almost certainly stall (due to artic ice melt) and cause a flash ice age over europe some time between 2025 and 2099.
I’m quite tempted to move back to Australia which would instead see a permanent El Niño after AMOC collapse reducing temperatures and increasing rainfall greatly (and extreme flooding of course).
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My professor who taught a course on Climatology back around 2009 discussed this eventuality back then based on available models and data. She now works for the US Navy to address climate resiliency related challenges.
A European ice age would be the result of a stalled Gulf Stream Current due to the resulting lack of energy transfer from the equator northwards and over to Europe (and back again every 300-500 years).
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What?!? I’m trying to stop myself from taking your bait and pulling @nosummer’s great thread off topic even further, but this is an absurd statement. Miami is already having high tide flooding in neighborhoods that never used to have that problem 40+ years ago, such as Key Biscayne and Miami Beach. During a king tide, the salt water comes up the storm drains and floods the streets closest to the water. The sea level is 8 inches higher around Miami than it was in 1950, and it is estimated that it will be another 12 to 18 inches higher by 2050. It doesn’t sound like much, but many neighborhoods there are barely a foot over sea level. I grew up there and my extended family and my wife’s extended family mostly still live there. It’s not a political thing in Miami anymore, people from all political persuasions understand the sea is rising quickly, because they have eyeballs.
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Is everything that happened before harmless? The last ice age wasn’t so kind to humans, and the value of European real estate certainly went down 
Yes the climate has changed before and CO² has been the cause before, but what took tens of thousands of years back then has taken 150 and mainly the last 50 years now. It’s not hard to tell.
It sounded like you were agreeing, if I was to guess it seems you read the articles, saw the C word which I never mentioned myself, and then politics came in and thought went out. I wasn’t telling you to move to Australia (if you could), I was talking about my own thoughts as an Australian away from home, so why get so excited?
People who plant fruit trees and hope to see them thrive one day in the far off future should be most in the mindset to see what is happening but many still cheer it on rather than admit how bad things really are already. You think we can keep this up for another 75 years without doing anything? C’mon now.
You mention Cork, we’re sitting on 52 lat compared to Toronto at like 42 lat, yet we have zone 10 climate and might rarely hit -5C. The houses are built with town water buried like 6inch under the drive. If the AMOC stalls we’ll be more like Alaska and our whole infrastructure is fucked then.
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Sea level rise is nothing compared to the effects of AMOC stalling. I’m not saying a thing about sea level rise (which is obviously also happening and a big threat but at a slower scale), not everything can be reduced to a simple little one dimensional scale you can bury your head and quibble over.
Look up the AMOC there’s a lot of articles right now and until then take your misunderstanding of what I was talking about to another thread please.
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And actually Miami’s high level of sea level rise is in large part because of that same issue, not just the global sea level increase. Miami’s sea level is strongly controlled by the strength and location of the Gulf Stream current right next to it, and the weakening of that current is a big part of the recent rapid increase there.
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