Today in the orchard
Today we picked the Frostbite trees (aka MN 447). I admit it was early. In a normal year we’d pick them a couple of weeks later. But in 2025 nearly every cultivar has been early. As a result, the flavors have been less than optimal. But when the seeds are dark brown and half the crop is on the ground, we pick. The fruit does look good. Frostbite often cracks around the cavity (stem end). This year there’s hardly any cracking at all. Maybe that’s a result of the drought. With less water being sucked up by the roots, the fruit is smaller but the skin stays more intact. The less than optimal flavor is a bit of a mystery. With less water, you’d think the flavors might be more pronounced. But with the fruit dropping early, it could be that the flavor just doesn’t have time to develop. Still, “447” remains one of our favorite apples.
There’s a long story behind Frostbite. It was selected nearly 100 years ago and then spent decades languishing in the forgotten-apples repository at the University of Minnesota. No one seemed to know what to do with it. The flavor was dubbed too weird. Meanwhile it was used as one of the parents of Keepsake and Sweet Sixteen, two excellent apples. That subsequently made it a grandparent of Honeycrisp. The University sent us scionwood about 20 years ago, and we now have 8 trees. We love it. Although the tree-growth vigor is subpar, pollination and production is good even when the weather during bloom is poor as it was this past May. The fresh dessert quality is unusual but—we think—delicious and, on top of all that, 447 seedlings almost always have superior fruit. Several of our 447 seedlings have proved to be wonderful apples themselves. This is a great apple.