I just weighed one of my large Honeycrisps and it came in at over 17 ounces. Impressive but pointlessly large.
4 summer sprays of Indar and Captan may have been the reason that they didn’t get rot spots and drop early this year. But even though most stayed on the tree longer than in recent years, last harvested yesterday, they didn’t quite get up the brix and came in around 12.5%, so. Not real good to my palate but sweet enough to make non-apple snobs very happy. They are my most popular apple among friends right now- not everyone’s favorite, but definitely the pop tune more people are humming.
My biggest one so far is 14+ oz. Most are 10-12 oz range. Family, neighbors and friends love them. I think they don’t taste as intense as previous years.
I think I might have asked about your Macoun in another thread, but how old is your tree? Isn’t a M7 tree? Do you have any pics of them?
I started a thread about the unrulyness of my Macoun earlier this year, and it has put out some nice scaffolds since then. They’re still a bit high up on the tree, but I’m pleased with its progress this year.
One of the local grocery stores always carries really huge HC, but I do not like them as the flavor is very washed out. I much prefer the smaller ones as the flavor is more intense.
my wife picked up some of these from earthfare…I’d never seen apples so large in my life. I’m not a huge honeycrisp fan and didn’t find them particularly enjoyable, no way you can eat a whole one…
My HC get large, but not as large as my Shizuka. Ive got a real whopper growing this year, on its own branch… I think shizuka might be my favorite, partly because they stay green and the birds and wasps tend to leave them alone!
I got tired of gigantic honeycrisp that are too big to eat. This year I intentionally did not thin mine. They still got to be large but at least not too big to eat in one serving.
I also agree that they are not as tasty this year as last year. Not sure why. All who eat them just rave about them but I think they had better flavor in years past than this year.
About 2" of rain last month and 2" this month for my location. It has been sunny and hot here over the past week, but the month before that it was cold and cloudy 6 days a week. Maybe the leaf issues with HC make it more sensitive to sun deficit? In any case, my other apples are meeting expectations under the same conditions.
It’s just a difference in sun exposure. Mine looked like hers at the beginning of last week. The recent sunny heatwave turned them bright red. They are so bright I decided to put a net over the tree. I figure they will surely catch the eye of migrating birds. I had so much bird damage with peaches this year that it leaves me apprehensive.
One benefit to the green skin is that it indicates ripeness by changing to yellow. Before this, they are mostly just a sweet-tart apple… well maybe not this year.
My wife bought a large Honeycrisp from the local produce store that was one of the few I’ve tried that I thought worth eating in years.
It wasn’t pretty, had significant water core visible even before cutting it. It wasn’t as explosively crisp as usual, probably a bit over-ripe. I measured brix of 17. It was sweet.
I think they need to be at least 15 brix for me to enjoy.
edit: I’ll bet this apple was grown by a neighbor. This produce store occasionally has things like persimmons and quince from the neighborhood. The Honeycrisp apple wasn’t cosmetically up to standard and the price was low.
Of course, but we’ve been dry for 2 months now- problem is not enough to dry out my soil. The maples defoliated early (fungus from excess rain) so they aren’t pulling anything out of the soil. It’s a rare growing season where the soil stays quite moist all the way through.
