I think it is OK to talk about “club apples” in the main forum. We are a lot of new members, some may not know what club apples are.
Also, there more and more new varieties of club apples. I don’t mind learning what new varieties are club, what not.
Not everyone achieves a Lounge level. Even if members who reach the level could have an access dropped if they are unable to read or post often enough to keep up. In other word, keeping things in Lounge will limit many members’ access to the info. Lounge should be for other things that are not about fruit IMHO.
@alan I respect your point of view as well (and you had already voiced that opinion earlier in this thread) but as @murky said, patents unlike diamonds, aren’t forever. In 20 years, having a record of each club apple will be beneficial for us to fall back upon, assuming this forum still exists then. I hope it will, and by us, I mean the collective community, not necessarily “us”.
Apples like cosmic crisp are basically “club apples” as only Washington state has access. I’m still interested in learning more about them in the off chance I end up there or again for when patents expire. Additionally, there is nothing stopping those club growers from joining our forum, even if they haven’t yet. This may actually be an interesting avenue to pursue if anyone is connected in the industry to said growers.
I’d also argue that discussions of some of the club apples - and where they collectively fall short (generally in that they’re so reduced to appeal to the widest number of people as to lose any interesting apple falvor) - is also a good jumping off point for discussing apple breeding in general. There is absolutely no reason for those of use with some land to NOT be able to breed our own apples. And, since we have very different end goals than the commercial guys, we’d do it differently.
So, while any of us could try to create something similar to a club apple at home, there are lots of reasons to NOT do that. And, studying the pedigrees of some of these to learn how they got there is sometimes a roadmap of what NOT to do if you’re looking for something that is more suited to a specific climate, situation, and palate.
Is anybody else following the apple breeding project at SkillCult? I admit, his ebay auctions of his new scion wood got too rich for my blood, although I think a lot of it was about interested individuals supporting his work. He’s breeding for Cali, and I’m not sure how well his stuff would do in the great white North, but I like to see what he’s up to. He also offers pollen from his trees for sale for those who would like to breed their own trees. For that matter, USDA GRIN also offers apple pollen. That might be available this year, in spite of the fireblight issues, where scion wood was not?
I ranted on this topic a little on my podcast recently, and will probably do a follow-up at some point, as it’s a bit of a hot-button issue for me.
So… crisp like honeycrisp, but definitely sweeter with a tad more flavor, but I definitely wouldn’t go as far as saying it is tart in any way. Overall a solid apple. I’ve been planting the seeds at my jobsite in hopes that I’ll get a harvest sometime while I am doing maintenance in the future
I just got one tonight, forgot I’d had it before and found this thread (that I started) in a Google search. This one was excellent. I want more. I got one along with 20 or 25 Evercrisp on an outing.
This one has good sugar but I think its a little bit more tart than sweet. Reminds me a lot of Pink Lady, including some hardness, but not quite as dense and more crisp.
This is early February. Perhaps they were more mellowed later in the year like when the ones we talked about before were eaten.
I got a bunch from QFC, a local Kroger grocery store. The texture and flavor are good, except some of these have that same bitterness that has been turning me off of Cosmic Crisp. It must be a treatment for storage. I hate it.
Like with saccharin, I’m convinced that I taste this sort of bitterness more strongly than most people. Otherwise there’s no way they’d think it okay, let alone desirable, to use. It tastes like poison to me.
