That was my reaction to Evercrisp, too, and the one I sampled was from a farmers market in Champaign, Ill., and the vendor was a retired horticulturalist from the University of Illinois’ PRI program. I did like it better than Gala.
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I tried a local Suncrisp last year and it was the most insipid apple I’ve ever tried.
The old apples such as the Catawba beauty, King David, A G Russet, Kinnairds Choice, Stayman, Winesap, Black Twig, are much more desirable than the Cosmic Crisp, Crimson Crisp, Suncrisp grown locally.
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My wife loved the local grown Crimson Crisp that ripen here in early September. They were also a favorite last year. I have young trees of it on G210 and B118. Best red apple in that season so far. Will have to see how they compare to the old varieties once my orchard starts to bear.
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I have never heard of Suncrisp being reviewed as being insipid. As I recall, Ed Fackler had very high praise for it, so I know it can do well in hotter sun than what we have here, because he was a NAFEX apple guru who had a small commercial orchard in a lower midwestern state. However, it isn’t a great storage apple, and it does BECOME insipid, even out of refrigeration after a couple of months in storage. Growers also often make the mistake of picking it before it is completely yellow, which seems to be required for it to bring out its Cox virtues.
At any rate, if you are judging apples by what you can buy and not by what you grow, it’s pretty hard to know how much the flavor influence comes from the genetics, the environment or the skill of the grower. storage methods, etc. Varieties also often have a great deal of variability just on where they are in the tree. If you have a tree full of apples in your orchard and have grown it for several seasons, you should have a pretty good idea about its quality.
Vintage Apples in VA praises the variety… but then, they sell it, or used to. Still, it is hard to believe that an apple bread by Rutgers specifically for production in the mid-Atlantic states would fall flat in VA.
That said, I don’t offer it in my nursery because I find it stubbornly biennial here. . .
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I just pulled this up from CHAT- Rutgers and later USDA trials (Winchester, VA; Biglerville, PA) noted that Suncrisp retains texture in storage but loses its aromatic complexity after 6–8 weeks in common refrigeration — and this is exactly when packers want to move fruit into distribution.
What is interesting to me is that it is the nature of its aromatics that make its full flavor short lived- they are highly volatile compared to Goldrush and other apples that hold flavor well in storage whose aromatics are of a more stable chemistry. If you are interested in the chemistry, ask CHAT.
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That makes sense. The ones I tried last year were sampled late Nov.
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Interesting. The ones I purchased look a bit green. I suspect they were picked early and placed in storage, and why the flavor is a bit hollow. I do love the smooth texture of the flesh. These would grate well. I’ve always used Galas for shredding an adding the material to muffin mix and pancake batter. I’m not sure how a tart apple would work.
Try them at a PYO and they balance well as a sweet tart apple.
I got some crimson crisp at a PYO this year. I found them pretty boring. Then, they spent a month in my fridge and a couple days on the counter and now they’re really good and interesting. So I don’t know if the PYO opened them early or if they’re hard to get at the right time or if they’re just the kind of apple that does better after a bit of time.
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I tried the Crimson Crisp in a Dutch apple pie. The texture of this apple is very unique, and it makes for interesting pie filling. It doesn’t break down. The flesh is ultra fine textured making it smooth as velvet after being lightly cooked and baked. The tartness is stable and not overpowering. A desirable color is a plus.
The Winesap twang is magnified when cooked. It’s almost too much.
A Golden Delicious with the texture of Crimson Crisp would be awesome. I don’t always enjoy tart or twangy pie filling. Sometimes I simply want caramel and honey.
The Summer Banana is a detestable tree that’s time consuming to prune and pruning results in a hellacious water sprout response if full size, but reasonably disease resistant. It does make a great pie apple similar to a Golden D, but with some sprite. It’s one of my favorites for apple compote that I use for pancake topping instead of syrup or honey. The cooked flesh is very light in color. It also pies well.
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Is picking flowers off more effective to ensure annual bearing than picking marble sized fruit? I think that picking flowers could get you into trouble in areas where fireblight is rampant (bacteria can enter the tree through the open wound).
I do not have any idea about the danger of wounds created by picking off clusters of flowers, but until I did that with Goldrush thinning fruit was inadequate for spurring on decent annual production. It is the only variety I bother thinning that early for so my anecdotal evidence is thin. So I just checked with CHAT. I apologize for the fact that CHAT gave me credit for the question about FB- the thought never even occured to me and it’s an insightful question.
I believe that I get more consistent annual bearing from my Goldrush apple trees since I started removing much more than half of the flower clusters on this excessively spurring variety. Does this jibe with research? Also, someone suggested that where fire blight is a big apple issue these wounds might invite infection. Where I am FB usually strikes well after bloom so I don’t think that would be a concern here… it generally is no existential threat for the apple trees I manage anyway.
ChatGPT said:
That’s an astute observation and an excellent question — and yes, both parts of what you’re saying are well grounded in what’s known from research and field experience.
Let’s look at each point carefully.
1. GoldRush and spur overbearing
You’re right that GoldRush (Co-op 38) is unusually spur-prone, and that can make it self-inducing toward biennial or uneven bearing if not thinned very aggressively at bloom.
- Indiana / Purdue (Co-op program) reports from the 1990s and early 2000s noted that GoldRush forms very dense spur clusters and tends toward “cluster dominance,” meaning flower primordia set even on weak spur leaves. Without strong fruit or flower thinning, spurs exhaust their leaf area and carbohydrate reserves, producing small fruit one year and poor return bloom the next.
- Subsequent studies at Penn State (Crassweller et al.) and Cornell (Robinson & Lakso, Geneva) showed that bloom thinning or even cluster removal early in the season is the most effective way to maintain annual bearing in high-spur cultivars like GoldRush, Enterprise, and some Fuji strains.
- Geneva data: removing 50–70 % of flower clusters at king bloom increased return bloom the following year by as much as 2- to 3-fold compared to chemical thinning alone.
- The mechanism is simple: you’re limiting early sink strength before the tree commits excess carbohydrate to developing fruit, so floral initiation for the next year isn’t suppressed by hormonal and carbohydrate competition.
So yes — your empirical result matches the published findings almost perfectly. You’re basically doing a manual bloom-thinning equivalent of a blossom thinner plus return-bloom enhancer program, and GoldRush responds particularly well because its natural vigor is moderate and it overspurs so easily.
2. Fire blight risk from manual cluster removal
You’re also thinking correctly about the infection window.
- Fire blight (Erwinia amylovora) generally infects through open blossoms and then moves into succulent shoots.
- Wounds made by pinching or clipping during bloom can theoretically serve as infection courts if active inoculum is present and wet, warm conditions coincide (≥ 18 °C / 65 °F and humidity or rain).
But in your region (Hudson Valley, zone 6), when bloom-time weather is typically cool and dry, and your outbreaks tend to occur later as shoot blight after bloom, those hand-thinning wounds are very unlikely to increase risk.
Cornell pathology bulletins (Agnello et al., 2017–2022) note that:
“In low-to-moderate pressure orchards, hand blossom removal does not measurably elevate fire-blight incidence provided wounds are made before active ooze and are followed by drying conditions.”
In very high-pressure areas (parts of the Mid-Atlantic, deep South, or Pacific Northwest), they caution to avoid manipulating blossoms or spur wood during full bloom if daily high temps exceed 75–80 °F and wetness is forecast — but that doesn’t describe your situation.
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I had severe FB pressure when growing apples in CA. But I remember now, that the infections occurred when picking the little apples just after bloom. You could see the strikes entering on the left stem ends. I ended up thinning about 2 wks after bloom, and that was ok. I also picked of flowers on my Yarlington Mill and had no FB. So, I think that you are right, FB is more an issue with thinning small apples too close to bloom.
2024 was a high water mark for FB in my area. In response to the blight, I had to make endless pruning cuts to save one of my trees over a period of a month, mostly in May post bloom on my starkspur GD. This resulted in the removal of about 60 percent of the tree, mostly wood less than .5" in diameter. In theory, these pruning cuts created opportunity. No one cut resulted in upstream infection. The new water sprout should have shown the shep’s hook at some point. Didn’t happen. It took some time for some of the fruit spurs to really be conspicuous with the infection. Some of the apples grew to quarter size before really showing discoloration, but that had nothing to do with a late strike, but slow succumbing. This particular tree bloomed heavy non stop for three weeks. It was the heaviest and longest duration bloom I’ve ever seen on any tree, and it was a disaster with 98 percent of blooms infected.
On the other side of the yard, I had a Williams Favorite. This tree is among the most highly susceptible tree I’ve grown that’s comparable to the Sptitz, Red June for susceptibility. Shep’s hook everywhere, but unlike the Starkspur GD, this tree is a light bearer. If this tree would have bloomed like the Starkspur GD, it wouldn’t have made it through the Summer. I gave this 14 year old tree one more chance this year and it blew it.
My Ark Black tree saw about 50-70 percent of the were flowers lost to blossom blight which is commonly mistaken by neophytes as frost damage in 2024. There was no frost. Only three snips were made to remove wood canker. The blight spread stopped where the fruit spur met the branch or twig with near zero intervention of any kind.
Not going to discuss what happened to the small Bud 9 trees…
The 2024 year was a great teacher.
Weather was dry, hot, windy. No rain for 3.5-4 weeks during bloom. Maximum blooming, maximum insect activity, high favorability due to temps. Epic carnage.
2024 has causes so much trauma, I now perform daily flower pistil inspections on my trees when low temps are higher than 40 and daytime temps exceed 75 during the bloom. I can now identify infected flowers well ahead of petal fall.
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FB strikes depend on temps. Where it is warmer during bloom it is likely to strike then- that used to be all the literature I saw talked about. It used to confuse me that I’d see no FB in early spring and then there’d be all this little strikes on a tree that started on the tips of green shoots. Eventually I found the explanation. Those later strikes have never ended up killing an apple tree although I’ve dealt with them on many trees. On apples they have only killed shoots. I’ve lost branches of pears and in the course of 35 years about 4 pear trees from the scores of orchards I manage.
I tried cooking some Brushy Mt. Limbertwigs last weekend. I’m not sure if it’s a low flavor year for late apples, or if the Goldrush and Limbertwigs were picked way too early, but they’ve been a disappointment.
Not much tart, sweet, or anything eaten out of hand. Sometimes cooking can bring out latent flavors in apples, but the result was a basic tart apple. Since they’re a firm apple, the compote had a nice chunky texture.
The Goldrush apples grown in the same area are not great either this year.
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I just tried an apple called eva’s surprise is was a very good with a balance of sweet and acid. A large apple which i am going to talk to the farmer and see if i can get a couple of scions in the winter. Has anyone ever heard of this apple.
Could it have been Eve’s Delight? If so, it’s a sport of Spokane Beauty.
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Yes that is it. I really like it. I bought it at a self serve fruit stand and did 't have a lot of informstion on it. I am going to ask him what kind of sprays he uses and if it isnt to hard to grow inmy area i am going to graft a limb. Hopefully it will fruit in a couple of years on a mature tree. I am not a young man anymore.
Thank you for the information!
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