Pressing Cider
Big Apple
This 150 year old monster big apple tree is over by the stables at Yosemite National Park. Easterners are probably used to seeing apple trees this size, but out here this is a honking big tree. From what I found on the ground I think it was Rome Beauty.
The Park Service is at a quandry about what to do with these trees. They consider them non-native exotics, and usually would remove them from the Park. On the other hand, they are more historic than the Ahwanee Hotel and pre-date it by decades. They are one of the oldest artifacts from the Pioneers in the Park, and so they still tolerate them. However they do consider them an unnatural food source for bears, and so enlist a small army of volunteers in August to pick the apples off so they don’t attract bears in the fall.
I would argue this point, but just to my right there was a bear up in the neighboring apple tree feeding his face with apples, and we beat a hasty retreat.
Out With the Losers
I shredded an apple tree today. Our trees are really small and so it didn’t take very long, and it all fit easily in my electric shredder. I was able to dig the root ball out in about 10 minutes, and all that’s left now is a hole in the ground waiting for a new tree to arrive in the mail this week.
We live in a city lot and the apple trees must be irrigated almost year round, so I don’t have room for losers. Poor Lord Lamborne made the fatal mistake of producing inferior apples three years in a row, so I cut it down and shredded it in front of all the other apple trees to warn them what happens around here if you don’t produce (my mother-in-law says she noticed this too and tries to pull her own weight so she doesn’t get tossed out also).
If you’re wondering why I don’t just topwork the tree, grafting another variety onto the rootstock, its because our warm climate stifles the vigor of the tree and more often than not it lacks the vitality to recover. The scion will send out a nice shoot but the bark on the other side of the trunk dies to the ground and borers inevitably move in to finish it off. I’ve learned through bitter experience its best to just plant another tree, which will bear in a year or two anyway, even if started from a benchgraft.
We’re planting Cameo in its place to give it the torture test of our hot climate. I have about a dozen other trees ordered that will need holes also, and so I’m looking around for other underachievers to pull out to make room. Tough time to be an apple tree around here…
Apple Hunting
We went back to the mountain meadow where we bushwhacked this August to see if there are any apples ripening, and things were slim pickin’s. We walked around for about a half hour before finding the gem in the photo above (yes, there’s an apple there somewhere).
It turned out to be a Red Rome, a mediocre eating apple that still makes pretty good pies. We were a bit disappointed until heading back and having lunch as the resort in Seven Oaks, we confirmed that they serve the best hamburger we’ve tasted in the mountains. We need to find some excuse to go back there again.
PBS recently had a program based on Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire, A Plant’s –Eye View of the World. It was beautifully photographed and had interviews with some true apple geeks, and consisted of four segments. I was of course interested in the apple segment of it.
Pollan marvels how brilliantly plants have adapted to changing environments, cleverly getting animals and humans to do their will. Aside from my annoyance at Pollan’s assumption of the apple’s relegation to a cold climate, it was obvious what happens to someone’s outlook on nature when he willfully ignores the finger of God in all creation. All of a sudden it is nature that is all-powerful, all-knowing, exceedingly wise. Nature and chance is how the world we know came about being, not the Living God divinely creating it as an environment to nurture Man and to display His creativity and power through.
In fact, a person who rejects God and instead embraces Nature and chance attributes these with all the attributes of God; nothing is too hard, nothing is too complex for Nature and chance to create; the main difference is that he is not accountable to Nature and chance, and can do whatever he thinks right in his own eyes. A man is a fool to look at an apple seed with systems and processes far, far more complex than man could ever design or even dream of, and attribute this to blind chance rather than the divine design of God. This is paganism to replace the true and living God with a false and impotent god of your own imagination, which only leads to folly.
Apple and Orange
As a reminder that my blog is called Apples and Oranges, we include an orange in today’s post. I harvested both of these today in our yard, a Robertson Navel and a Nittany apple. The navel has a beautiful red flesh, and this is the very front of the season; they’re best around December. The Nittany is a product of Penn State and is just wrapping up the season for us, and the stragglers on the tree are starting to have a wrinkly skin, but the flesh is still firm and crisp. They were both very good, and I’m thankful to live in a place where we can grow both.
Second Crop
Many low-chill apple varieties and some higher-chill apples will give a second crop in a warm Mediterranian-type climate. The crop is usually much smaller and will ripen around December. This is sort of an “afterthought” of the tree and not a main crop. The tree will then briefly go through dormancy before blossoming again late January.
However, in the tropics, two to three “real” crops in a year are possible. This is because daylight length and temperature are pretty much constant, and the tree is tricked into thinking it has undergone dormancy by stripping the leaves off the tree by hand. This is tough on the tree and extra fertilizer is applied, and the tree will never get very big. Anna and Dorsett Golden respond quite will to this culture, as does Rome Beauty and Wealthy.
Honeycrisp
You would think I would have learned by now about assumptions, especially when it comes to apples.
I always assumed that since Honeycrisp was developed by the University of Minnesota to be very hardy in frigid conditioins, and because the texture is so crisp, that it would get fried down in our heat and have terrible quality.
But last fall I bought a bag of Honeycrisp from Oak Glen, which has cold winters but gets a good bit of heat in the summer, and they were the best I’ve had. So I decided to take a chance and try it down here at our Riverside nursery.
September here has been stinking hot- well over 100 degrees since Labor Day, peaking out around 109 degrees. The Queen Cox tree next to the Honeycrisp got fried. But we tried our first Honeycrisp off the tree yesterday, and IT WAS GOOD! A little bit denser than in the supermarket, but VERY crisp, VERY juicy, VERY sweet, even when picked quite a bit green (the seeds were still pale). The color wasn’t anything like the supermarket example shown in the above photo, but the flavor was better, as the above apple was a bit sour.
This matches reports I’ve received from Northern California, where they have cooler winters but stinking hot summers as well. The tree definately has vigor issues in our heat (the professor at U of M says it has vigor issues everywhere), and so I’m grafting it onto more robust rootstocks like M111 and even seedling, as I want more of these! I’m happy to add it to our “Favorites” list, and will try not to be so prejudiced in the future; who knows what treasure I would have overlooked.
By the way, the patent on Honeycrisp ran out this year, and so it may be freely propagated. We’re going to be sending it to Africa to see how it does in Rwanda.
WineCrisp
I received a nice email from Schulyer Korban at the PRI (Purdue, Rutgers, University of Illinois) breeding program inviting me to test their latest release, WineCrisp. For some reason all the PRI varieties I’ve tried have done very well here in our hot climate, and I have high hopes for this one.
Licensing on new varieties like this are very strict, and even for testing it was prohibitive on the small scale I do; however, all is not lost as Schulyer told me the orchards that have been licensed to propagate, and so I ordered some benchgrafts from Kickapoo Orchard in Wisconsin. If you’re wanting to try it send an email to Bill Meyer at mmmeyer@mwt.net The benchgrafts are $5 each plus shipping; there may be a minimum quantity.
The WineCrisp Description can be seen at the PRI website by clicking here
Red Boskoop
Today at 2:00 PM the weather station at the Riverside Municipal Airport (RAL) read 104 degrees F and 3% relative humidity (that’s 3%, not 30%) and 20 mph winds; not exactly ideal fall weather for crisp, juicy apples. On days like today if you see big, billowy clouds over the mountains they’re not thunderstorms, but firestorms from the wildfire in the mountains. One consolation is that it will get down to 56 degrees tonight, cool enough to need a few blankets.
Another consolation is this little tree pictured above, Red Boskoop. If you count carefully you’ll see 9 apples on it, besides the one I picked. Despite the name the apples are not red, and actually are really ugly. But when I bit into one, all that was forgotten; as soon as my teeth sank in for the first time I knew this was a great apple; crisp, very juicy, sweet, very tart, tingly. After swallowing your mouth still tingles a while.
The description off our updated Apple List is as follows;
Boskoop, Red A modern redder strain of Belle de Boskoop, which originated in the Netherlands in 1850. The whitish-green flesh is firm and dense. Belle de Boskoop is essentially a dual-purpose apple, suitable for both dessert and culinary uses. It works equally well in a savory salad, or can be used sliced in apple pie. It keeps its shape when baked into a pie, and can be used as the “sharp” ingredient for cider. We harvested our first ones this year, and they were wonderful in our climate; juicy, tart, sweet, crisp, and extremely productive (9 full-sized apples on a tiny little 2′ tall M27 tree). It supposedly improves in storage, which we may never find out as I can tell we’ll be eating these. I bet it would make a killer pie. Ripens mid-October; tested excellent for Southern California.
I’m going to give it a few more weeks to ripen to see if it improves, and then will try to store one a while to see if they do indeed improve in storage. Either way this fall I’m going to graft it onto a more vigorous rootstock, as we’ll be wanting more of these gems.
