On 10/30/2012 4:55 PM, Willi wrote:
Am 30.10.2012 05:52, schrieb Maroochy:
Willi wrote:
... particularly 'Elstar' in this case, covered with the first Central
European snow.

Neat shot, are the apples still edible?



I tasted 2 of them today. They are still good and taste fine. (Well, it
were only the first signs of winter and not the Ice Age.) It has been
warm today and the other apples remain still on the tree.
I grafted the 'tree' myself. It is in a pot and only about 4 feet tall.
The branch with the apples is sort of the main trunk actually. Of course
I had to lean it against another plant in summer, because it bore 7
apples this year to my surprise.


I have 4 apple trees. One is a Honeygold, the other 3 I have
multi-grafted so that I have at least a dozen cultivars growing on them.
I found by accident that the Honeygold can take a lot of cold weather,
with no damage. In my location, Honeygold is about as late an apple as I
can grow. If we have a colder than average summer, they don't quite get
ripe enough. I always let them hang on until October. One year, the tree
was still loaded and suddenly the forecast was predicting a low of 20
degrees F (that's about 7 below zero Celsius). My wife and I went out
before dark and picked the majority of them and brought them inside.
A day or two later, I was out in the yard and noticed the ones still
hanging looked pretty good. They tasted just fine too. Completely
normal. I left some out until it got even colder and they didn't really
get badly damaged until it got down to the mid teens. Most of my other
apples turn to mush at much warmer temperatures.

Steve in the Adirondacks of northern New York