I picked the last my few Waltana Nov 22 and it still didn’t seem ripe enough. The seeds where dark brown. Do they get black? We had a 20 degree night and that did bother them. The tree gets very little sun this time of year. I’m wondering when they are best picked in zones 6/7?
Following up on my own post about KY Limbertwig, they are tasting much better out of storage already … they taste a lot like a Black Limbertwig.
@danzeb, dark brown seeds should be ripe. Mine ripened mid-late season but it is supposed to be a really late apple. There is a chance I had the wrong variety.
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@scottfsmith Scott do you have any notes on Yates taste, performance? Maybe I missed it in your list but pretty sure you have it.
I should edit the above, I expect when I posted it I did not have enough years experience with Yates to write any comments on it.
Yates is very late, and I am not sure it always ripen enough in my climate to get optimal flavor. Some of them have a deep rich flavor with good tannins and others are just more average. The flesh is still a bit green on the inside which is a sign they did not ripen enough on the tree. It is not a strongly sour or aromatic apple. The fruits are very small.
As a tree it is excellent! It bears early and very prolifically and has no problems of any diseases or anything else for that matter. That is what I like the most about it, it is the perfect southern apple.
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Thanks Scott. My friend Larry n Alabama raves about it as an excellent eating apple that by the way is also bulletproof for him too. Maybe it needs that extra heat in the South.
I’ve got some nice Yates scions that I think will topwork a few Enterprise branches.
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Scott, what’s your experience on Harrison as far as tip vs spur bearing? I see a lot of conflicting reports on this, and I’m starting to wonder if I need to plan on moving it to a more dwarfing rootstock than Bud-118 to keep it a manageable size. I’d been planning on summer pruning, but that seems incompatible with tip-bearers unless I’m just really not understanding how this all works…
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I don’t have enough experience with it, all I had was a couple small grafts until about 5 years ago when I put in some MM111s. But they are not reliably fruiting yet.
Well, in terms of tip bearing I should say I don’t find any apples extreme in that regard. They may start off bearing a lot on tips but eventually settle down to a more normal pattern. So to me tip bearing is more about young apples than varieties. YMMV!
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Oh, interesting! I’ve never thought about how it might vary with age of the tree. I guess I’ll have to muddle through and see what happens. Thanks!
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That’s fascinating, Scott. I had three apple trees bloom for the first time this year, and all of them bore their flowers at the end of last year’s growing tips, in spite of the fact that two of the three, Blue Pearmain and Reine des Reinettes, are listed as spur bearers, and I believe that Blue Pearmain is said to be pretty freely spurring. (I have found it hard to get much info on the third, which is Wheeler’s Golden Russet, but if it’s a sport of Golden Russet then it seems likely that it’s partially tip-bearing.) Very helpful to know that this may be something that the trees are likely to grow out of.
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I am at my computer now (was on phone for above one) and I looked up tip-bearers. I have two supposed ones, Blenheim Orange and Worcester Pearmain. Neither are tip-bearing in the slightest in my orchard. @Alan at some point mentioned that Yellow Transparent is the only true tip-bearer he ever ran into.
The one case where I think about tip bearing is pruning newer growths on a tree. Some longer new shoots will have blooms at the tips, don’t head that shoot let the tip bear which will bend down the wood and create future good spurring areas.
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There are lots of apples that often (biennially?) bear on the tips of last years wood- Fuji and Jonagold come to mind, but they also bear on 2-year wood and from old spurs. On many varieties it is the 2 year wood you want to manage for your crop.
Yellow Transparent and It’s similar child whose name I’ve forgotten seem to bear all their crop on those tips and do so every year.
I could almost call Pink Lady a tip bearer, although it’s not its exclusive point of production.
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Lodi?
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That’s the one.
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The main reason we grow that variety is that it is named after where we live.
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Re “Bulletproof” apples. I was very pleased when I finally got ink to print out Scott’s updated list for 2018. South facing slope, oh dear, we have done that before. I wasn’t interested in any property that faced South or West, and hoped to have some lake effect on the place we did buy. After years of making fun of the NOAA weather predictions, we realized that the reason they were about 4 degrees too high all winter, every winter, was because cold air from the lake was blowing up the creek to our place. So we don’t heat up as fast in spring, that’s for sure.
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But in the course of looking at info on Southern apples for the umpteenth time I started noting references to “low chill” varieties, including some that have done well for Scott. Being on the other side of the Appalachians, we have a LOT of chill hours before our last killing freeze. I notice that one variety was supposed to both be low chill AND a late bloomer, something hard for me to believe. Though rots are supposedly a big problem here (the squirrels never leave me any ripe fruit) I don’t think that Zone 8 apples would be a good idea here.
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If you went orchard land shopping and bought where you can’t shoot squirrels…that’s a drawback. I plan to shoot whatever eats my apples …if I can catch them in the act!
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We are surrounded by forest, and the husband’s not a good shot, and not dedicated to squirrel extermination. We had a bad year for them a few years back. Live trapped 20 and took them out in the neighbor’s field for the dogs to catch. Neighbor’s grandson said he’d shot 60 that fall. We ordered a Kania trap that year, but they were so back ordered we finally gave up after 6 months. (People in England were buying them to kill the imported gray squirrels that were wiping out their native reds.) Tried again last fall, never even heard back. But LOOKS like it may be easier now. Hate to order anything from Amazon, but we could try the company directly again.
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Thanks for the thorough account of your experiences with different varieties. I’ve got a few from your list in my young orchard here in NY - 5B. Curious to see what difference a few zones makes.
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Scott, I wonder about your Wickson description every time I review this thread and re-read your excellent initial post. “Grape-like flavor” seems out of place in my Wickson eating experience, unless the grapes you typically eat are very high acid. Even then, I never think of grapes when I eat it. While it’s definitely high sugar, the acid also present balances the sugar so well, it does not come across as super sweet.
Have you grown Muscat de Venus, another Etter crab? That apple is super sweet with no balancing acid. I find it cloying and unpleasant to eat, and since I get so much more sugar from my apples compared to most growers elsewhere, it has no value for me in a cider blend. Do you think it’s possible you Wickson came to you as a mislabeled MdV?
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