Thats odd, I’ve never had GoldRush be less than great, unless they were picked before they were fully ripe. My marker is little or no green in the coloring on the bottoms. Before that point they can be bland.
BMLT I am not getting enough apples on to see how it’s going to do. I’m not sure I have a long enough season for it; some have been great but some don’t seem to have ripened well. I have only one left and I’m going to let it hang out in storage for awhile before trying it. I’m hoping for the first big harvest next year, I have two trees that are coming into bearing.
Im admittedly new to GR, but we’ve been getting them from a local orchard for 4-5 years. Last year they were very bland with an unpleasant earthy flavor mixed in. Even the late picked ones. This year they’re unbelievable good. Excellent tart and sweet really builds nice this year. We asked and they have no clue why the down year. GR is deff on my add to list.
I appreciate the update on your experience with GR apple here in Ohio. I am in SW Ohio and as you can probably attest we can get some crazy weather swings of weather conditions.
Just not comfortable with the very late ripening time this apple seems to need. I hate to waste the space on an apple that never gets to ripen correctly.
I’ve been purchasing these unspecified variety of Limbertwigs sourced from the same orchard for three consecutive years. I presume these are Old Fashioned due to size and skin texture. 2023 and 2024 were purchased from a vendor and I have no idea how they were stored. 2025, I purchased them directly from the orchard. They were picked the last week of Oct still a bit green. 4-5 weeks later, they’re still a bit green and lacking in flavor. The 2023-24 crops were explosive. I’ve never had anything like them. Most of the Goldrush I bought at the same time still have green skins as well.
A ripe Goldrush is golden (two meanings). An unripe green one never turns golden in storage and never becomes very good. In Z7 a normal year should always adequately ripen GR, although you may have to wait until the first week of Nov to harvest them. As long as day temps are getting into the 50’s and green leaves are on trees they should continue to ripen. Temps have to drop below 24F to represent any danger to the variety late in the ripening season.
Goldrush is very susceptible to Marsonnina leaf blotch and early defoliation. Even if the leaves hold into Sept the quality of any late ripening variety will suffer from excessive leaf loss before harvest, even more so on summer pruned trees ( I recently learned that if spur leaves are defoliated apples can draw carbs from more distant leaves, including annual shoots that often keep their leaves in spite of blotch attack).,
Commercial growers tend to be excessively fearful of hard frosts because university guidelines are extremely lacking on the subject. Goldrush quality probably often suffers from premature harvest as is the case with several late ripening varieties such as Braeburn and Granny Smith. .
I always wondered about this so thanks for posting. Chestnut Crab totally defoliated this year from leaf blotch, guess I could spray it along with Goldrush. So far one Immunox spray at petal fall keeps leaves on Goldrush.
Don’t thank me, thank CHAT for leading me to the research this is based on. At some sites blotch becomes a problem for late bearing apples even when a fungicide spray is done in mid-July and mid-Aug… meaning late varieties may require a third summer spray in mid-Sept. Leaving uprights to protect against this is a pretty tough call… if spurs hold their leaves, spring and summer removal of annual shoots is a bonus.
Yeah, it may destroy democracy and accelerate the transferal of wealth from (former) labor to its owners, but we can’t seem to do much about that, so we may as well make the most of it. If you can’t be middle (or professional) class, at least you can be well educated for its own sake.
August of 2025 was unusually cool. 2.5 degrees below normal. This may have slowed things down a bit.
Commercial growers seem to be inclined to shut down the harvesting by Oct 31st.
The orchard on the Brushy Mts has a very different climate than mine in town. Parkers Orchard sees frequent Summer thunderstorms and cooler temps. I live in a river bottom in town that runs a bit dry in the Summer and bakes. I suspect Parkers is 3 weeks behind me despite the fact they’re just 30 miles away.
Cooking results are in. The appearance of the finished product is good, but the flavor is rather musty. I would not rate this as a good desert or cooking apple. I will try again in a couple months, but I doubt the results will change.
Or maybe a week. Take the drive when an apple he grows has been ripe for a week at your site. Not that the stat won’t change some from year to year. But 3 weeks is a very wide difference based on my experience with many different sites. A full zone difference generally represents a weeks difference but the matter can get complicated when you are dealing with different latitudes. Up until the fall equinox more northern zones enjoy longer days, which speeds ripening.
In discussions about apple storage I learned that different apples respond completely differently to being picked a couple of weeks before being ripe and CHAT found credible historical evidence that the Baldwin and Newtown apples picked as much as 3 weeks early end up being far superior to tree ripened ones once they arrived in England after the long boat ride stored in oak barrels with sawdust. That is, they end up much better being ripened that way than when they are tree ripened- sweeter and more flavorful in a way that storing a fully ripened apple cannot duplicate, whether fresh picked or out of storage. Limbertwigs may benefit in the same way, but Goldrush does not. All varieties have their own chemistry… Ask CHAT for details if it interests you. This is new territory for me. The only apple I ever deliberately picked green in the past was Jonagold, and it ripened into a very nice apple just as flavorful but not as sweet as tree ripened ones. Kept texture much better in storage when picked green.
I’m thinking residential refrigeration runs too cold to ripen up ripened apples. 45-50 degrees may be better.
I don’t think the vendor I purchased the GRs and OFLTs have any kind of refrigeration they’re extremely low budget. That’s probably why their GRs and OFLTs I purchased this time last year were absolutely fantastic.
Which CHAT are you using and referring to- getting the information from? I see a lot of choices when I put CHAT in the search bar. If you mentioned it earlier in this thread sorry to ask again.
Thanks.
Do note though that ChatGPT has no particular advantage over any other LLM. They’re all changing and innovating essentially daily.
I asked an AI for a list of popular and free-to-use ones:
Text and Chat Generation (Large Language Models - LLMs)
These are the most popular systems, capable of answering questions, writing essays, summarizing text, and generating code.
System
Free Offering & Key Feature
Gemini (by Google)
Free Tier Access: Provides real-time information access (via Google Search) and is highly integrated with Google Workspace. Available through the Gemini website.
ChatGPT (by OpenAI)
Free Tier Access: Offers access to the powerful GPT-4o model (with usage limits). Includes basic image generation, data analysis, and web browsing capabilities.
Microsoft Copilot
Free Tier Access: Integrated into Windows and the browser. Utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and DALL-E 3 for image generation.
Perplexity AI
Free Tier: Provides search-focused answers with clear source citations. Excellent for research and getting factual information.
Hugging Face Chat
Free Access: Allows users to chat with and compare various cutting-edge open-source LLMs (like Llama, Mixtral, and Mistral) in a browser interface.
“Early defoliation,” of Gold Rush? First I heard of it, because my Gold Rush on Bud118 has several times been last to drop all its leaves. A look outside after several mornings of 21-28°F lows, shows both Gold Rush and Claygate at about 70% leaf drop.
I wonder if this specific combination delays dormancy, since Lamb Abbey and Mere Pippin are both bare today and also stand on that stock.
If you can’t be middle (or professional) class, at least you can be well educated for its own sake.