My “Hoops” are grafts on there third year. I’m now thinking they can’t be Golden Russet because a graft of it probably wouldn’t bear well on its second year and heavily on its third. It also isn’t a tip bearer.
Anyway, they should be ripe in a couple of weeks if they are Hoops and will take a couple more weeks if they are Golden Russet. My identified Golden Russet already has a high percentage of rots that the so called hoops does not, so my hope grows.
I don’t think Golden Russet only bears on tips of one-year wood like Yellow Transparent does, as I recall. It certainly predominantly does. but I agree that it has a difficult growth habit.
Mine look like the Century Orchards picture. The surface is a bit bumpy like a moon landscape; GR doesn’t have that at all so it should be very easy to tell them apart.
My Hooples look similar to @murky 's apples. I got my tree from Southmeadow Fruit Gardens- so it should be the real deal. This is the first year of a large crop. I am very happy with the flavor and crispness of the apple. The skin of a russet takes a little getting used to, but I am very pleased with the apple.
I checked the South Meadow Fruit Garden website, it describes HAG as a beautifully russeted apple. @murky’s apple is barely russeted. However, he is in the west coast. His climate may influence the coloring and russeting.
You are in PA. I would think you HAG would look like the pic from the Century Farm I linked. I would call that a beautiful apple.
Here’s a pic of 3 Hooples next to a couple Golden Russets. I’ve been eating Hooples for a week or two (are they supposed to be later?). Brix is about 15 and the seeds are black. They have good crunch. As you can see, some are getting rot.
My Hooples are like sandpaper, but I don’t think they are as rough as Mamuang’s. My wood came from Scott as well.
I would like to modify my previous answer about the Russeting on Hooples. On apples that fell from the tree earlier, the russeting was incomplete- like @murky’s apple (although the seeds were dark on those apples). The apples that are on the tree now look like Bob’s. I wonder how much the age of the tree impacts russeting, as my tree is still quite young. Hooples, for the first few years of the tree, the fruit seemed to stop growing/split/get corky and I got no apples worth eating.
On a separate note, does anyone have Marssonina leaf blotch on Hooples? My more mature Goldrush and Suncrisp are struggling right now, but my young Hooples seems fine so far.
I only grafted HAG to my existing trees. That was several years ago. Fruit was russeted from the get-go. Mine have never corked or cracked.
Last year, Hooples got Marrsonina leaf blotch as bad as Gold Rush but this year, after 4 sprays, HAG has not suffered Marrsonina as badly as Pomme Grise and Rubinette. These last two suffered severely despite fungicide spray.
Of the nine apple varieties that I currently have, HAG is the most susceptible to Marsonina LB and to Cedar Apple/Quince rust. My current varieties:
Fuji
Evercrisp
Starkrimson Red Delicious
Hawkeye
Unknown Red Delicious
Rubinette
Kidd’s Orange red
Ambrosia
HAG
I had to do two additional fungicide sprays (one in the spring and another in the summer) to stop the diseases from completely taking over the two HAG scaffolds that I have.
I sprayed fungicide 4 times with the last soray in early July. Still not enough to stop MLB, esp. on very susceptible varieties like Pomme Grise, Riubinette.
I do two summer fungicide sprays, one in first week of july and the other a month later and it seems to work well. Pressure was high this year and I included Topsin M in my sprays with Indar and Captan in a shotgun approach. .
Research has been entirely inadequate, probably because in regions it exists commercial growers usually keep active fungicide on the trees throughout the growing season.
You are right to the point here! Last year I didn’t spray fungicide in the summer and my apple foliage was hit very badly, I remember going apple picking in Oct at a local orchard, and I was amazed at how healthy and deep green the foliage looked in that orchard…
That is not too hard to find out if you refer to Cornell’s “Pest Management Guide to Commercial Fruit Production”. In the past I’ve been able to find access to it for free on-line through other universities. It lists the range of suggested pesticides available to commercial growers. The average interval during a typical growing season is probably about 2 weeks for post insecticide fungicide sprays with a bit tighter schedule to control insects in spring.
It’s weird to me how many fungicide apps they recommend to control fly-speck and sooty blotch. I have read that if you don’t control for them through June they become established and cannot be controlled, but I never apply fungicide sprays in June and get pristine apples in the few orchards I manage to achieve them. In fact I get pretty clean apples with the only two fungicide sprays that I use to control Marsonnina leaf blotch. September apples can look completely pristine, even after all the rain we had this season.
This includes the fact that I’m spraying a lot of huge apple trees that don’t necessarily allow the same air movement as typical commercial apple orchards on dwarfing rootstocks and grown like bushes on support.
I’m happy to say my Hooples is likely the real deal as it is drop-off-the-tree ripe already. It certainly isn’t Golden Russet. However, it does not seem especially extraordinary this year. No depth in flavor and it doesn’t hold a candle to the Ashmead’s Kernel apples I’m harvesting at the same time. Now there is an apple that packs a wallop of deep and rich flavor. Cox is also very good this year and to my palate a lot more interesting and fully flavored than Hooples- but Cox is a difficult apple- at least at my site. I used to grow it at a more open site with dawn to dusk sun on top of a hill where it was much easier to grow without all the rot that destroys much of the crop on my site, even with calcium sprays and plenty of fungicide apps. Those weren’t needed at this other site.
Captan is still the bedrock for control of most fungi on commercial apples especially for bitter rot in the southeast. It’s multiple modes of action help prevent resistance. Merivon, Pristine or other modern fungicides are often added to Captan. Concerns about developing resistance to more modern fungicide limits their use to just a few sprays. Some modern fungicides combine two modes of action in order to help with resistance management. Merivon for example is both 7 and 11 MOA.
Summer rots like bitter rot have been a huge problem in NC over the last decade and a lot of research money and time has been devoted to understanding the rots and how to manage them. Captan is the still the foundation of all of the recommendations, often as a cocktail with Prophyt or Merivon toward the end of the season.
Ziram and Manzate are two other older fungicides with fewer concerns about resistance.
Here is one publication that discusses rot management
The spray guide for Apples in the Southeast shows all registered fungicides for Apples along with effectiveness and some comments.
My orchard is fairly young, 40+ apple varieties on trees 3-4 years old. Mostly M111. I haven’t bothered with sprays to date, instead bagging the handful of apples I got this year.
My Hooples tree is ⅔ defoliated so far this year by Marssonina. It only had two apples which I pulled off weeks ago out of mercy. The rest of my trees are looking good. Even the foliage on the neighboring Goldrush looks close to pristine, after getting moderate CAR the past two years. The summer has been very dry, spring dryer than usual as well.
Long term I’m thinking of staying fungicide free. I can bag a few hundred apples each year to eat fresh. Most of the excess fruit is intended for hard cider anyways. For folks who aren’t spraying, is Hoople’s holding enough leaves to make a decent crop? If it keeps this up, it may find itself top worked into something else.
Marssonina and Glomerella look very similar and both defoliate trees.
In areas where both exist it almost takes a lab sample to determine the exact fungus.
In my state all varieties are susceptible to Marssonina but varieties with Golden Delicious parents are more susceptible to to Glomerella. Not sure if any research has been done to determine which varieties are less susceptible to Marssonina but I believe the disease was first discovered in New York so perhaps Cornell has looked at the better varieties.
Hooples has GD parentage and should be very susceptible to Glomerella. Our Hoople tree produced no usable fruit during our two no spray years.
We tried zero spray for two years for 700 trees. Out of about a dozen varieties only Winesap produced useful fruit in year 1 with no spray and no varieties produced useful fruit in year 2
Both diseases respond to better sanitation. Remove all mummy fruit, all prunnings, drops and leaf litter. Goodluck
