sherwindu wrote:


Steve wrote:
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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.


Your description of Arlet sounds like what I remember. What I am growing
doesn't seem the same at all, but I also don't think it is ripening
properly. I have no idea if the scion was wrong or if Arlet just doesn't
ripen up here.
I obtained the scion wood from Richard Fahey. You certainly know Richard
if you are a member of NAFEx. As far as I can tell, he is well organized
and wouldn't sell the wrong thing. I could be wrong. It's probably safe
to talk about him here since he doesn't use electricity, let alone
computers. ;-)



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.


I grafted it as a side branch on a tree with other varieties on it. That
branch isn't big enough to produce much but it produces less that I
would expect.
The worst thing is that every pest loves that variety! Normal apple
pests but also Japanese beetles. We are just now building up to a hefty
population of Japanese beetles around here. I noticed the beetles on
that apple tree. They were eating ONLY the Honey Crisp leaves! Not a
single beetle on the entire rest of the tree but a dozen or more on the
Honey Crisp branch.
Actually I have Honey Crisp grafted on 2 trees and I haven't had a good
apple yet. The ones I have tasted were pretty bad. They are supposed to
be a good northern apple too. Same source for the scion wood.

Steve