Today in the orchard
We continued picking the last of the late apples. Northern Spy, Lincolnville Russet and Stark are dropping fast and could have been picked a few days ago. The Benton Red (aka Salome?) are right at the perfect moment: a few drops but coming off with ease. The Reinette Simarenko are holding on tight and could stay on another week or more, but it’s time to go.
The apple I call Green Monster was just beginning to drop but we “caught” nearly all of them. It’s large, green, firm and crisp. It’s had me scratching my head for decades. It’s in a row in a fairly old orchard and should be a grafted tree, but I don’t think it is. (The abandoned orchard is in Waldo, not far from Belfast.) The tree is majorly twisted and very cool. When it was DNA profiled, it came back as a seedling of Tolman Sweet. It’s not a true sweet, however, and we have not been able to determine its second parent. I’ve read that Tolman Sweet seedlings were sometimes used as rootstock, so maybe it’s an old un-grafted rootstock: Green Monster.
In the late afternoon we went to South China to harvest a recent seedling discovery I’m calling South China Sweet. This one is a true low-acid, sweet apple. The fruit size is large. We collected 4 bushels of good quality drops and another bushel off the tree as the sun was going down.