I went through this thread on the best tasting crab apples sometime in early October, and because I am a crazy weird data nerd, I tallied the times certain cultivars were mentioned. as they are all crab apples, they are all likely small so they might be worth looking into. there have been additional comments added to that thread after I put this together, so this table doesn’t capture all the content. take it with a grain of salt.
| Cultivar | Notes | Times it was mentioned in a positive way |
|---|---|---|
| Wickson | hard fleshed - bug resistant | 6 |
| Chestnut | PC Magnet | 5 |
| Centennial | no acidity | 4 |
| Trailman | 3 | |
| Almata | red-fleshed - doesn’t store well | 2 |
| Narrangansett crab | 2 | |
| Kerr | hard fleshed - bug resistant | 1 |
| Bastian Orange | 1 | |
| Callaway | 1 | |
| Whitney | 1 |
I personally don’t grow apples, but I find as far as size is concerned I prefer something smaller to medium size. while I love a big mutsu, they can be hard to eat whole and can hurt my jaw.
I have scionwood of butterball and yates on order from 39th parallel, and I might be getting my hands on some candy crab scion wood over the winter too for grafting to a wild crabapple. hopefully in a few years I could give some data on those from my own personal experience.