Perfect example. I hope you taste a hint of pineapple!
Last year, we spent the whole winter buying apples from the store
Good opportunity to taste different varieties, but this year my trees are bearing again
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Picked my one and only Honey Gold, this apple was full of flavour. I don’t remember it being as good last year but this August was extremely dry, maybe that had something to do with it
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Mrs. G.,
Ate the Ananas Reinette today with hubby. Good blend of tartness and sweetness but no crunch and not juicy enough to have juice. Could not measure brix as a result. No hint of pineapple, unfortunately. A small apple with nothing special.
This was the only one this year. Hopefully there will be more with a better taste and texture next year.
What I have learned is that my trees do not bear fruit that is particularly good for the first few years. They need to mature to produce fruit, as it is described. Along with that factor you have to deal with whatever Mother Nature gives you. But… when both are in sync that’s when the magic happens. Patience. 
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Grace,
My Gold Rush will be quite a few weeks away from ripening. I don’t know how big GR usually is. Mine all look small’ish, about the same size as that Ananas, around 4 oz only.
Tippy,
My Gold Rush size varies. The biggest I have is about 3 inches in diameter. They have started to drop even though the color is still green. I’m hoping there will still be some left that will turn golden yellow.
Picked the Fujis from my runty tree - 34 nice apples
And that wraps the orchard. Best season EVER.
Watering the tree now
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Got about 10 or so Cox’s Orange Pippins… sure, it had touches of all the things it is susceptible to, but MAN. The best apple I’ve ever had.
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It really is orange!
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My yellow delicious are ripe. I let the dog out early as the sun was coming up. I noticed four had dropped that I bagged. I picked the rest. This tree is on it’s sixth leaf so not a whole lot of apples but they are my new favorites. They are crisp and crunchy with a nice balance of sweet with some acid.
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My first potential apple from my yard is a Razor Russet known for long hanging and improved flavor after storage. It’s still not yielding to a gentle tug, but I have to think it has to be done soon. I am fairly confident that the top got sunburned, and I am not sure how much that damages the whole fruit.
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Not from our orchard, but my wife was out today, and found this apple at a local mart that was selling these. She just picked up one, but said they had lots for sale. She says the sign said Cortland, but this doesn’t look like one to me. It almost looks like pics of Macoun’s that I’ve seen online, but not in real life. What say y’all? It has a very lopsided profile to it, and is purpleish.
What say y’all?
We’ll give it a taste, and report on the flavor.
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Looks like a Cortland that got good sun. Mine didn’t get great sun, but tasted like a Cortland should.
Looks too round for a Macoun to me.
It was pretty tart, not a lot of sweetness or other noticeable flavors. The texture was pretty crisp, almost hard. It did not brown after cutting up, like a Cortland does. It did kinda taste like the Cortland’s we got from an orchard last year.
Maybe if it sat for a couple weeks it might develop a bit more sweetness. My wife liked it, but I was kinda meh about it.
Went running in the woods and decided to swing by an old pasture site where I remembered seeing some apple trees. It’s hard to tell whether the trees were planted deliberately in the first place. There’s a bunch of them there, but they’re kind of scattered around, not planted in orchard rows or anything. Some of the trees looked to be dead or barely hanging on, and few seemed to be carrying any fruit, but I did find a couple with some apples on them.
The first tree I sampled from actually had a good number of crab-sized yellow fruit (visually similar to Golden Hornet), but unfortunately the apples were over-ripe and gone soft. Gave one a try anyway, for the sake of science, but it was too tart-and-nothing-but-tart for my taste.
Then I found these guys.
They’re about two inches in diameter, and prettier in person than they look in the pictures. As you can see, there’s orange-red striping over yellow, with minimal russet. More red on the ones that were getting more sun. There was a fair amount of sooty blotch, which I wiped off for the big photo shoot, and what looks like it might be some minor scab damage. Some of the ones that I didn’t take home had some fairly minor bug damage, but overall they looked pretty good for a completely untended tree. The tree itself was kind of broken down, but appeared to be one of the healthier ones out there.
Do these apples look like anyone you know? If they’re a wild crab, as they probably are, they’re by far the best wild crabs that I’ve ever tried. (Not that I can claim to have particularly wide experience in that area.) For me, there’s something compulsively bite-able about wild crabs, even if you know you’re going to want to spit them out almost immediately. Kind of like the pleasurable pain of eating a hot pepper or jumping in a cold lake. These apples had the qualities I connect with that experience (hardness, tartness, and - in this case slight - teeth-tingling astringency), but tempered by enough sweetness and character of flavor to make them genuinely enjoyable to eat, not just fun to bite into.
Of course, this review is wildly biased by the fact that I climbed a rickety old tree on a beautiful fall day to snag them. That being said, I think I may need to get some tips on collecting scion wood next spring!
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Look up Crimson Gold. There’s two apples with that name. One is a crab apple relative, maybe a little bit bigger.
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Thanks for that suggestion, John. Took a look and the Crimson Gold story was worth the price of admission in itself. And you’re right, the apple I stumbled across does seem to share a general profile with Crimson Gold, or Wickson. (It sounds like CG and Wickson are sometimes confused? I’ve never tasted either, so I’m going by reputation here).
That being said, I confess I’m skeptical about the likelihood of it being Crimson Gold. From the looks of it, the tree may be simply too old. And how would an apple that was almost lost at its home in CA end up in an abandoned pasture in MA?
I’ll have to go back and look more closely for any sign of an old graft, but at this point my best guess is that it was a seedling.
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