Today in the orchard
More apple sauce for the flying saucers of the omniverse. I’ve been using up the early-season apples lately. It’s interesting to see how they do after a month or two in storage. The Red St. Lawrence are still in remarkably good shape. I made sauce with them today and was pleased with the result. Red St. Lawrence is a sport (mutation) of the classic “St. Lawrence,” which is a seedling of Fameuse (aka Snow for its glowing white flesh). Fameuse is one of the most important of all historic, northern cultivars. It’s one grandparent of McIntosh and is in the ancestry of many other cultivars. It’s a great dessert and cooking apple in its own right. We have a very old Fameuse tree at our place. Both Fameuse and St. Lawrence migrated to Maine from Canada back when the border was not much more than a formality. You can find old trees of both sprinkled around much of the state. We certainly scored when those two apples showed up.
Red St. Lawrence apparently arose spontaneously from a St. Lawrence tree in Newburgh, a few miles south of Bangor sometime in the early twentieth century. The ground color (“background color”) of the apple is red unlike the original St. Lawrence which has a distinctly green ground color. Mutations like this happen in all plants and are often coveted by collectors. For a reason I’ve never been able to determine, such a mutation is called a sport. Although sports can be maintained asexually through cuttings or grafting, they are—as far as we can tell—not genetically different from the original plant. I’ll talk again about sports in the orchard report, but for now I’ll just say Red St. Lawrence has a rusty red ground color. It’s a very good, early-mid-fall apple.