Steve wrote:

James wrote:
I've learned that location is very important to growing apples. I will
never get good apples from my trees because they are in my back yard
instead of a hill somewhere.

What's the problem with your yard? Too much shade? Poor drainage? A lot
of back yards can grow pretty good apples.

Someone used to have an apple show a bit north of here, up near the
Canadian border. They managed to have about 100 varieties to show and
they would cut a little slice of most of them for tasting. Then you
could vote on your favorite top 10. It was great fun.
The trouble was that more than half of the apples were brought up by
someone's relative who grows a bunch of varieties in Pennsylvania.

In our case, all our apples on display are grown by our members, most of
whom live in a 50 mile radius of the Arboretum.


My
personal favorite was an apple that was originally named Arlet (and
still called that by most people). It was given the name Swiss Gourmet
as a marketing ploy to try to make it competitive on the mass market.
(I've still not seen it in a store yet.) Anyway, that was a great
tasting apple. I obtained some scion wood and grafted it as the top of
one of my trees. Well, it's not great up here. Not very edible at all in
fact. I'm trusting that the scion wood I used was the correct variety. I
would never guess it was what I tasted years ago as grown in
Pennsylvania.

Actually, we are selling some apples we get from an orchard in central
Indiana. We did a pre-tasting selection of their apples to decide what
would taste the best. Actually, we liked the Arlet enough to order a
few boxes, but it wasn't the best apple we tasted. The apple is not
extremely sweet, but we thought it had a good flavor nevertheless.
The Arlet is a medium to large apple with bright red over rich yellow
background color. I'm not sure where you bought the scion, but there
are at least four nurseries on the West Coast that sell this tree.

I'm not having much luck with my Honey Crisp either.

If you are talking about production, my young Honey Crisp only had
about 6 apples this year. The tree is only about 6 feet tall, so I am
expecting that the apple count will increase with the coming seasons.

Other
varieties known to be good in the north are much better.

If crispness is a big thing, Honey Crisp is a great choice. There are
apples with better flavor available.

Sherwin D.



Steve (in the Adirondacks of northern NY)