Right now it’s quite tart, but it’s not fully ripe yet; even when ripe it is definitely on the tart side, but there’s so much else going on with the flavor and sugars that it’s hard to say. It is not a sweet apple like, say, Cameo.
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KDS is very tart although it mellows with a month or 2 in the fridge.
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Cuckoo4…I have 50 or 60 different varieties, all in containers, so pollination is not a concern here. If one has only a few trees, it would be a concern as you suggested. I found less coddling moth damage this year on uncovered fruit than other varieties. (I had always covered all in Surround soaked footies but has my collection has gotten a bit out of hand 
and I left many apples uncovered.) Karmijn has that wonderful T3 vigor.
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Thanks @Quill. I may go with melrose to partner with my gold rush. I see good reviews on melrose from tall clover farm in washington. They also grow melrose and karmijn near me at an orchard in Salem. So I can always just buy a box of karmijn each year.
What’s the name of the orchard in Salem? I’m not sure I’ve seen Karmijn for sale. I have a branch of it, but I think the one apple it produced this year may have gone missing.
@murky the orchard in Salem in called EZ Orchards. They have really good apple cider and lots of fresh produce including apples like kds, melrose, jonagold, jonathan, and more.
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@murky, there is or was an orchard in Brush Prairie by a man named Florian Deisenhofer. I saw his name on Orange Pippin. I never visited but he has a great variety of apples including Karmijn.
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Went into orchard yesterday and looked at my karmijn. Split one and seeds were brown getting close. It had water core tried it. Way to intense flavor hope they mellow out on tree or do I need to store them in fridge first? If they don’t improve I try next year but way to intense for me. Mouth pucker intense. @marknmt
They are intense when fully ripe but not mouth-puckeringly so. I think with a little more time on the tree they’ll mellow out for you. I’ve not had the watercore with them that I recall, but I don’t mind watercore so I might not make too much note of it. They won’t store for more than a few weeks, so if you do hold them in the fridge keep a close eye on them.
Mine are still a ways off. Maybe I should try one.
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Showing my ignorance but KdS is a triploid which means that it can’t pollinate other apple varieties. But are the seeds of KdS apples themselves sterile?
The answer I got from osu ask extension is that the seeds will be viable. But less chance. Of course not true to variety like all apple seeds
Typically, triploid seed would be sterile. Basically the rule of thumb is that the ploidy of the pollenizer and the seed parent must be divisible by two in order to produce viable offspring. Thats because the chromosomes need to split before recombining to form new novel DNA. I believe many triploid apples are considered “pollen sterile”, meaning the pollen is not viable. Otherwise, pollination by another triploid could potentially produce viable seed, albeit another triploid. Diplloid and Tetraploid, the other likely parents woulx not be able to produce offspring (3+2= 5, 3+4= 7, neither divisible by 2)
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Actually, I bungled that explanation. Triploids will ALWAYS be sterile, both pollen and seed, because the splitting of chromosomes occurs before recombination. There is no way for 3 sets of chromosomes to split and produce full sets of chromosomes. Theres no such thing as 1.5x ploidy. That said, there’s an exception to every rule, Im sure. Nature and genetics do weird things at times…
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