Yesterday was a very big day at Super Chilly - I harvested the first Helen apples ever in the world! I’d been watching them all summer, wanting to be certain not to miss them when they began to drop. As I was coming in from the orchard, two were on the ground and three more were still in the tree. They picked easily so I grabbed them all. Helen is an open-pollinated seedling of the English cider apple, Sweet Alford. The pollen parent is not known. Sweet Alford originated in Devon in the early 20th century.

I started “op” seeds from several English cider apples in about 2014. In 2017 I planted two of them side by side not far from the house. The other tree is a seedling of Major. The obvious name for that apple was Minor. Minor morphed into Miner, the name of a good friend and aspiring apple geek in Sudbury, MA, the ancestral home of Garden Royal, one of the best dessert apples ever. Miner is married to Helen and so the Sweet Alford seedling planted next to it acquired the name, Helen. Helen and Miner live on Hunt Road, so “voila” - Helen of Hunt. (If you can follow all this, you get today’s gold star.)

Helen of Hunt is medium-sized, mostly conic-shaped and opaque-yellow skinned with faint reddish stripes. There’s a bit a russeting in the cavity surrounding the stem. (For the record, the apple’s namesake, Helen, does not look like this.) Like Sweet Alford, the apple has no acidity. It’s bitter, slightly astringent, banana flavored, not juicy, firm but not crisp. The flesh is impressively tannic, turning brown almost instantly. (The real Helen is also sweet with a bit of sass.) I think the apple should make great cider or molasses.

Chestnut crab and Milwaukee are ready to pick. Chestnut is a wonderful dessert fruit, and Milwaukee is a large cooking apple. The true identify of Milwaukee may be in question. That’s a mystery I’ll save for another day.