I would like to hear from everyone else about their own winter keeper apples. My own are dwindling too quickly to be of much use for real evaluation…down to the last half bushel, and they are going quickly! Someday I hope my supply will hold out til springtime.
The two varieties pictured above have held up well so far, Golden Russet is still somewhat crisp and has developed a pear-like richness. Goldrush is still quite crisp and has that good acidic bite, I hear these can really last.
Spitzenburg has also held up well with good eating quality.
Roxbury Russet has softened and isn’t so great out of hand, but has plenty of acidity and texture to be good for cooking, same with Baldwin.
From the local orchards around here-- I have had excellent Red Fuji (BC2) as late as March… and excellent Goldrush as late as May!
They keep the apples in cold storage.
I am in the process of trying to replicate such success in my own orchard, but it will take years for me to get there.
I did fruit a few Goldrush this past fall, but they were eaten immediately, and were excellent right off the tree. I let them hang as late as I could without losing my patience. They were picked and eaten on Nov. 3.
My Red Fujis and Pink Ladys are both as crisp and flavorful as the day they were picked. I didn’t have enough Gold Rush to keep this long, but like Matt said, the ones I get at the Farmer’s market last until May or beyond and they are still amazing - crunchy and flavorful. They run out of apples to sell before they become unsellable. I usually buy a box from them the last week they have them and they’ll keep until they’re gone (into June, maybe even July - - again, they’re eaten before they go bad so who knows how long they’ll last).
No Black Oxford for me this year…it supposedly originated in the same Maine county I live in, Oxford county. A good all around apple, mild acidity that gIves way to sweetness in storage. They call it Rock because of how hard it is when it comes off the tree, and I have heard tell of them lasting through the following spring and into summer from a root cellar. Another variety with a reputation as the superior keeper is Stark, I haven’t had this one tbough.
A while back one of the publications of the Rosbreed project was a report on which of a number of common apple cultivars had each of four alleles that were correlated with long storage life. If I recall correctly, Fuji had all four and I found the information useful to assess which varieties had some genetic potential for good winter keeping. Rosbreed seems to have taken down or moved the one summary publication and finding the data now is more difficult. If I can find it, I’ll edit and post a link. In any event, there is data out there on which cultivars do(not) have the potential to hold out until Springtime.
I know its all been said but the ones I knew of old timers grew for storage was arkansas black and Ben Davis. Fortunately for everyone else big horse creek knows of pages and pages and have a list of those apples here Long Keeping Storage Apples at Big Horse Creek Farm . we dry pounds and pounds of our apples and pears every year of the non keeping varieties and we can the juice as well. We also grow keeping apples for storage so we have fresh apples. I developed my own seedling crab apple that keeps into winter without cold storage.
This is my current list/plan for winter keepers. Pink Lady, Arkansas Black, Yates, and thanks to some generous scion offers I will be adding Goldrush. Bill
My Black Oxford started going soft early this month. And we have local co-opes that also have these and they weren’t holding up like I thought either. There seems to be a two-three month period that these are optimum. Just my two cents
These were in basic refrigeration, not sure if a root cellar would extend it?
I am now getting interested in the keepers that develop really interesting and unusual flavors after a long time in storage. Most keepers do not evolve new flavors as they age, they more “round out” what they already had.
Right now my two favorite “evolvers” are Newtown Pippin and Black Limbertwig. They develop rich and unusual flavors after several months in storage. Arkansas Black and White Winter Pearmain I have less experience with but they showed some potential as well. I have not been storing enough apples to really know which ones are best but hope to have more in storage next winter.
That is really interesting stuff Vohd…I’m surprised I’ve never came across it before. It seems like this was compiled to aid in future breeding work and may explain in part why Braeburn was chosen as a prime breeding partner with Royal Gala for the Jazz and Kanzi apples.
So Fuji with 5 favorable alleles would seem an ideal breeding partner for long storing apples, which is of course, always a plus if not an outright target of apple breeding.
So, it sounds like if an apple possesses the Md-ACS1 marker at chromosome 15 ,then additional markers may not enhance or add to an apples storability. That’s how I’m understanding it anyway. It seems logical to me since Goldrush (a well known good storing apple) only has 2 markers BUT does possess both favorable alleles at the Md-ACS1 genotype. Is that how you are understanding it?
It is worth noting however that this is obviously just focusing on one desirable trait and that many of the apples with the most favorable alleles are unheard of and many that are familiar to me really aren’t very good apples in other ways. When all the desirable characteristics necessary to create a awesome apple are considered, it’s charts like this that drive home the idea of just how staggeringly difficult it must be to breed a great apple, even when armed with DNA data. Seems like a computer program could possibly be developed to take all these things into account along with chance percentages and so on to suggest prime breeding partners. Perhaps it would even need to be done in layers or multiple generations. Maybe such a program already exists?
Thanks for posting…I really enjoyed the read!
Sure there are many algorithms you could run, a standard clustering algorithm could give some good results for example. Its a lot of work to set it all up though, not a weekend project. Here is one commonly used clustering tool: http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu/structure.html
Scott, that looks like exactly what would be needed, though I must admit, my eyes glazed over a bit when looking at the sample data sets. I’m a computer nitwit, so it’s all way over my head in that regard. I’m thinking that if Vohd was able to find this data on genetics in regards to storability, then there must be other genetic data available online for other desirable traits as well…right? Glossiness, thin skin, color, brix, shape, texture, ripening time, non-dropping, disease resistance (I’ve seen some of these), non-astringent skin, favorable growth habit, annual bearing…you name it.
I suppose a geneticist would almost have to be on hand to guide the construction of such a program properly…right or wrong?
I’m thinking such a program would monumentally reduce the test plantings required to bring an acceptable introduction to market. More accurately, I’m thinking a program like this could allow backyard hobbyists like us to have a zillion fold better chance of hitting pay dirt. Does that sound logical or reasonable? As far as I know, multiple test plantings would only then be required to weed out those that missed, that is to say, those that mere chance allowed undesirable traits to be expressed. I’m thinking very basic Punnett square stuff here.
Maybe I’m over simplifying things, but given the little I do actually know coupled with what I’ve seen and read it sounds very doable to me.
Maybe Alan could use his friend at Cornell to forward this discussion to Susan Brown who could set my thinking straight. I feel fairly confident they either have a program similar, or have dismissed it for reasons unknown to me at least. An expert in the field weighing in on the subject would be super interesting to me, and I think others as well.
What I’m not sure of is if the program is going to give a lot better data than just “eyeballing” it: make a list of the alleles you want, then just scan through the varieties list genetics and pick out the varieties with the most of what you want. The main thing clustering could do is to pull out alleles which are not strongly tied to a particular trait but which clustering could pull out.
I think the hardest part of getting such an experiment to work is you would need a lot of genetic data as well as a lot of expression data for the traits you wanted. My vague impression is all they have now is a few genetic markers, not full sequences of many varieties. There is probably not enough data (yet). I don’t know how hard it would be to run the tools, but they are designed to be used by experts so its probably not too easy.
In 20-30 years we will probably have thousands of apple varieties completely sequenced, and I expect we will have a much better handle on which varieties to propose to cross because of that.
Jeff the Punnett square seems like the right approach when you are trying to isolate a gene like resistance to fire blight or flavor. I agree that the problem and the blessing is all the other genes that no one even partially understands because those make scientist look like a handful of pre-schooler’s with a stick wearing blindfolds swinging at a piñata. Someone is going to need to do the work and map the genes but that will likely be a company and maybe they have already partially and not shared their work.
