Some ripe varieties at my orchard

General Fruit Growing
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A few pics of some ripe Apple varieties at my Hocking Hills Orchard.

Estonian Wine Apple, Veinioun in Estonian, setting fruit for the first time.

Estonia, 1950. Medium to large fruit with red skin, flesh and cambium.

Raspberry like flavor with crisp flesh

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Almata - (South Dakota, 1930’s). A Dr Nels Hansen developed variety. Medium sized fruit with solid red skin and a slight grayish bloom.

Striking watermelon red flesh with a delicious sweet tart berry flavor.

Great for eating fresh, apple sauce and canning. Brix measurement to follow.

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Alatau from Kazakhstan. Same ripening time as Almata but smooth skinned and super tart.

And with sold dark red flesh. You can see where the juice stained the paper plate where I cut the apple.

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Discovery is an apple variety from England first mentioned in 1949. Thought to be a cross of Worcester Pearmain x Beauty of Bath.

Great fresh flavor that stays crisp longer than most early apples. Slight amount of pink flesh around the outer edge and little through the center of the apple.

A very different sweet flavor, hard to describe. A very popular commercial early season variety in the UK.

Unfortunately, almost over night, the birds wiped out most of the fruit on the two trees full of fruit of this variety that I grow.

So frustrating dealing with birds and deer! Almost wish I could fence in and cover with netting all the fruit trees.

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Derek, how’s the texture on Almata? How would you compare its flavor and fresh-eating qualities to those of Geneva and Winekist?

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Glad to hear your positive feedback about Discovery. Just grafted it this spring.

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Do red apples keep their color when cooked or preserved? Those are gorgeous!

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Texture about medium I guess if you have HoneyCrisp at one extreme and over ripe Yellow Transparent at the other. Taste wise of those three my preference is Geneve (more of a sweet tart flavor rather than just tart), Winekist and then Almata.

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Definitely worth growing, a truly unique flavor.

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Yes and when making sweet or hard cider

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Derek- Beautiful photos and descriptions; thanks for sharing.

I’m alerting @SkillCult Steven Edholm of this thread. He’s a nut for red-fleshed apples, too.

The deer stole my first crop of Williams’ Pride - and the majority of my fruits - this past month = I am heartbroken, but have more resolve than ever to increase the height of my fencing…

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Thanks. Very cool to have all those varieties to test out. Mine are not doing so well between birds and scab. Birds wiped out all of my William’s Pride this year and are working on the rest. I’ve found all the etter reds so far susceptible to scab. Rubaiyat is probably the worst, to the point I’m not sure it’s worth growing without spray. A few more years of growing and I’ll know more though. Grenadine seems pretty bad too. Any scab resistant red fleshed apples that you have Derek? Williams pride seems very scab resistant and gets red tints in the flesh, so it might be something to toss in as a parent in breeding red fleshed apples. It has other good traits as well.

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I wonder if you can build a hang enough fence? Ideally it would be 8 feet tall with a nice mesh over the open area to keep out birds!

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I agree that varieties are so prone to scab that I wonder why I have them, Pink Pearl is one for me, some years they are great but years like this when we have so much rain they are just ugly. I only spray with a dormant oil in late winter then wettable sulfur the rest of the time.

The ways the fruit look in the images I posted are with that spray regime.

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Oh no, Matt. Sorry to hear about the deer damage. I don’t have to repeat my rants about my deer woes.

Don’t you have a six foot fence now?

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My fence ranges between four to six feet in height.

The orchard is surrounded by steep slopes.

I can see exactly where the deer came in. They scaled the slope, and climbed over, and bent (at exactly its weakest point) the four-foot section of fence. In order to do this-- they literally ATE their way through (what I thought was an impenetrable jumble of) thorny brambles, vines, and piles upon piles of foul-smelling Ailanthus coppice and log stacks. They ate through thick tangles of multi-flora thorn-rose, wild blackberry and cactus-like Japanese wineberry, and dense sections of mature spice-bush, Japanese barberry, and Tree-of-Heaven (aka “ghetto palm”). I could not believe it. I was absolutely stunned.

I have enough problems in life to spend any time wringing my hands in grief over the damage done. I don’t want to dwell on it. Counting my blessings-- I did get a few perfect early peaches… and lots of raspberries/ other berries… before the four-legged devils’ intrusion.

When the weather cools this fall, I will work to shore up the fence and augment its height…

Most of the trees should rebound next year.

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Wow, that’s some determined deer! Sounded like they were on a mission or something. Glad you were able to harvest some fruit. So, the damage to the trees was that bad?

I’ve also called them Devil Deer. Oh, they vex me so…

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I’m seeing a bit of that for the first time this year, perhaps because of the cool, wet spring we had in Northern California. Pink Pearl is hard-hit, and one of my Pink Parfaits as well. A number of others (including Rubaiyat) are scab-free, despite being in the same location. Rubinette and Cornish Gilliflower were heavily affected, but Karmijn de Sonneville wasn’t. Hard to guess what makes the difference. None were sprayed, as I don’t usually see scab here.

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