“ I think that I shall never see.
A poem lovely as a tree.”

Especially one full of fruit!

These are my pomona—apple and pear trees.

I wrote down, as superscript, the period the tree is in bloom so trees with the same blossoming period are together. Nonsense—my little pomona orchard has only 60 trees, bees will find all the trees.

I color coded the trees—eating v cider apples, eating v perry pears and for cider apples the type of cider apple, bittersweet like Brown Snout or Dabinett, dry or tart like King David or sweet like Golden Harvey.

Some of the non-cider apples will have a proportion go into the cider press—Sturmer Pippin is quite tart when first picked so some of the Sturmer Pippin apples could go into a crush of bittersweet apples, modify the bitterness of these ciders a bit.

One of the Beurre Bosc pears will need to be grown against a north facing wall or they are hard, fine for perry, not so good for eating.

As well as the above pomona I have sweet cherries, sour cherries (preserving) and three peach trees—spread the harvest period out a bit.

I love preserving peaches: picked ripe, cooked in a very light sugar syrup with just a hint of spice, one cinnamon stick and 3-4 cloves say then add some lemon zest and a squeeze of lemon juice to ensure sufficient acidity (for food safety reasons.) Then you pour a jar of preserved peaches into your breakfast bowl—the sun is shining from your bowl, nice in grey wet winter!

---

Lots of things to learn, e.g:


Quote:

Like many French cider varieties Frequin Rouge is not particularly easy to grow. It is can be susceptible to fireblight, canker and scab in temperate climates. It also takes a few years for production to start, and it will readily lapse into biennial bearing - but if carefully managed it will crop heavily.

https://www.orangepippintrees.com/trees/cider-apple-trees/frequin-rouge

So have to learn to prevent or treat “fireblight, canker and scab” and to prevent biennual bearing need to learn how to prune properly to ensure a good crop every year, not every other year. Other trees share these propensity to disease or biennual bearing (bearing every other year.)


Fun!

Cox Orange Pippin, tho the epitome of eating apples, is also not easy to grow.

Interesting stuff.  I've never heard of half of those apples.     :-[

One type I miss from my childhood is the Snow Apple (Fameuse)
which grew in both my grandparent's back yards.    Along with
almond and walnut trees.

Jovial Monk wrote on Sep 19^th, 2022 at 9:10am:

“ I think that I shall never see. A poem lovely as a tree.” Especially one full of fruit! These are my pomona—apple and pear trees. I wrote down, as superscript, the period the tree is in bloom so trees with the same blossoming period are together. Nonsense—my little pomona orchard has only 60 trees, bees will find all the trees. I color coded the trees—eating v cider apples, eating v perry pears and for cider apples the type of cider apple, bittersweet like Brown Snout or Dabinett, dry or tart like King David or sweet like Golden Harvey. Some of the non-cider apples will have a proportion go into the cider press—Sturmer Pippin is quite tart when first picked so some of the Sturmer Pippin apples could go into a crush of bittersweet apples, modify the bitterness of these ciders a bit. One of the Beurre Bosc pears will need to be grown against a north facing wall or they are hard, fine for perry, not so good for eating. As well as the above pomona I have sweet cherries, sour cherries (preserving) and three peach trees—spread the harvest period out a bit. I love preserving peaches: picked ripe, cooked in a very light sugar syrup with just a hint of spice, one cinnamon stick and 3-4 cloves say then add some lemon zest and a squeeze of lemon juice to ensure sufficient acidity (for food safety reasons.) Then you pour a jar of preserved peaches into your breakfast bowl—the sun is shining from your bowl, nice in grey wet winter!

Well done

Jovial Monk wrote on Sep 19^th, 2022 at 9:34am:

Cox Orange Pippin, tho the epitome of eating apples, is also not easy to grow.

Well, it is an English variety, THE English apple, some would say. Best grown in English-like climates like the Apple Isle.

Crisp and crunchy, aromatic, great flavor the Cox Orange Pippin is the epitome of eating apples. As distinct from, say, that ball of cotton wool known as the Golden Delicious.

The Cox is difficult to grow but oh so worth it!

Brown Snout are cider apples with tannins that give the cider mouthfeel and a bitter taste

From Heritage Fruit Trees:

Quote:

Dessert wine-like qualities. Yellow-green coloured fruit, russeted, rarely slight pink-orange flush. ALERT - limited range in Australia, combination of very high chill requirement and late flowering results in few useful crops except in areas with cold, long winters. Pollination Group: PG5 Uses: Cider, bittersweet Harvest: March - April Features: Top cider variety, Vintage cider

https://www.heritagefruittrees.com.au/brown-snout-apple-dwarf/

PG 5, Pollination Group 5 is the latest to flower. Brown Snout does not flower until the first week in November! (one apple variety flowers even later, hard to find pollinators for it!)

Despite the “alert” anywhere in Tassie is fine for this tree! The “High Chill” is a measly 800 hours, pfffft even George Town on the Bass Strait coast has that! In summer most places in Tassie have nights of 10°C even if the days reach over 30°C!

The russet that gave the Brown Snout their name makes the apples look uninviting and the taste will back that up—the sort of tree to plant along the fence line :)

If you want the mouthfeel the tannins and pectins give but don’t like the taste—add some tart apples to the crush, Granny Smith or the UK cooking apple Bramley’s Seedling, will modify the bitterness but not really the mouthfeel.

AusGeoff mentioned Fameuse aka Snow Apple. I do not have this variety but here is what is said about it:


Quote:

Thought to be a Canadian variety and may have been raised from seed brought from France by early settlers. It was planted in the USA in about 1730. Fruits have rather soft, fine-textured, juicy flesh with a very sweet and vinous flavour  similar to McIntosh. Possibly a parent of the Macintosh. Called the Snow Apple due to its pure white flesh, the correct name is Fameuse and it is often called Pomme de Neige. A hardy and heavy bearing tree ideal for home orchards. A firm favourite with many. Syn. Snow Apple; Pomme de Neige. Bultitude J. (1983) Apples A Guide to the Identification of International Varieties. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pollination Group: PG2 Uses: Eating Harvest: March - April Features: Lunchbox

https://www.heritagefruittrees.com.au/snow-apple-fameuse-apple-medium/


An eating apple.

Vinous—complex, smooth and balanced like a great wine. does not mean the Fameuse tastes like wine.

Lunchbox—an apple small enough and delicious enough to be worth putting in a lunchbox.

Interesting the similarity with McIntosh.

Getting away from cider apples let us look at a fine eating apple. So fine it is the most popular eating apple in the US, tho it was found in Canada:


Quote:

McIntosh is without doubt one of the great North American apple varieties.  Like its 19th century contemporaries Golden Delicious and Red Delicious, it has become a highly influential apple variety with numerous offspring.  However unlike those varieties its popularity has not spread outside North America, and indeed most "Mac" production, remains centred in New England and across the border in Quebec and Ontario. The apple was discovered by a John McIntosh, a farmer in Ontario in the early 19th century, and he and his family became involved in propagating the variety.  The McIntosh apple was ideally suited to the climate of the area, being a heavy and reliable cropper with good cold hardiness.  McIntosh achieves its best flavor in colder apple-growing regions. The McIntosh style is typified by attractive dark red or (more often) crimson colours, and a crunchy bite, often with bright white flesh. The flavor is simple and direct, generally sweet but with refreshing acidity, and usually a hint of wine - often referred to as "vinous". In general these apples keep reasonably well in store, but the flavor falls away quite rapidly - although remaining perfectly pleasant.  Nevertheless to get the full vinous sugar rush it is best straight from the tree.

https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/mcintosh

Pollination of the McIntosh:
https://www.orangepippintrees.com/pollinationchecker.aspx

McIntosh (Malus domestica)  is infertile and needs a pollination partner of a different variety nearby.

Varieties the pollination checker (very handy tool that!) lists as pollinating McIntosh:

Cox Orange Pippin
Sweet Coppin

I have both of these. One other tree is listed as pollinating McIntosh: Granny Smith

We all know the sour green cooking apple Granny Smith (discovered growing in her compost pile by Mary Mae Smith) but its pollinating power is pretty incredible—I went through the list of all the apple trees I had ordered that were still living. Granny Smith pollinated nearly all of them! Only the very late bloomers like Brown Snout or really early bloomers could not be pollinated by Granny.

That makes Granny Smith almost a crab apple! One of its parents was French Crab. “Aha!” you say “Granny is at least HALF a crab apple!” That is what I thought too until I found that French Crab was not, in fact, a crabapple! Maybe one of the other parents of Granny Smith was a crab apple? We will probably never find out.

To finish with Granny: it is picked in March by a lot of commercial growers but in fact it ripens in June. Good fruiterers will sell Grannies picked in June.

A note on crab apples. These are a type of small apples, related to our domestic apples but different enough genetically that they can pollinate them. Mostly apple, pear and cherry trees are not self fertile: a pollen from one blossom or tree cannot pollinate an ova on another blossom on the same tree or on another tree of the same variety. Peaches, apricots and some plums are self fertile, just one peach etc tree will produce a good harvest.

Crabs tend to be sour and full of pectin. Great for making crab apple jelly, great for making pectin jelly to freeze and use to set jams of fruit with really low pectin, e.g. apricot jam. Can add an acid kick to an otherwise overly bitter or very bland cider.

If you live in a big city or town just plant an apple tree—there will be sufficient apple trees around you to pollinate your apple variety. This is not the case for other fruits. If living in a small town adding a Granny Smith will likely see your other tree set lots of fruit as will the Granny Smith—unless the tree you bought was triploid.

Triploid varieties, e.g. Belle de Boskoop or Court Pendu Plat need a suitable variety nearby to pollinate it. But a triploid tree will not contribute viable pollen to pollinate the tree that pollinated it—so need three trees, two to cross pollinate each other while also pollinating the triploid variety.

Couple of links:
https://www.gardenfocused.co.uk/fruitarticles/apples/triploid-apple-trees.php#:~:text=A%20%22triploid%22%20apple%20tree%20is,variety%20nearby%20to%20pollinate%20them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy

French—supposedly Normandy—apple trees in my orchard:

Verite
Frequin rouge
Cemetiere de Blangy
Rein des Hatives
Antoinette

These are apples from Normandy.

Add to that:

(pear) Beurre Bosc, Beurre Hardy


This gives an approximation of the mix used to make the cider that is distilled into Calvados, French apple brandy. “Apple” brandy—bloody Frogs let 40% of the crush be pears!

Needed is a mix of:

Mostly bittersweets
A bitter (lots of tannins)
Some sweets
Some dry
Lots of pears! Like, WTF? “Apple” brandy???

Oh, yes, I intend to make a French cider to then distil into what I call “CalvadOz.”

Some notes from Heritage Fruit Trees:

Verite: a sharp (produces a dry cider)

Frequin rouge: Bitter flavour with some sweetness.

Cemetiere de Blangy: grown for bittersweet cider and Calvados (apple brandy)

Rein des Hatives: a sweet cider apple

Antoinette: a Bittersweet apple. Makes really superb cider apparently so might order another half dozen, use some for French cider/CalvadOz, some as a straight cider.



As to distilling, I have no idea if it is legal here yet. I know I had stills on display right in the front window of my brewshop. Cops came in twice (once to do with a break in, one to do with warning me about drug makers wanting my laboratory bench stand (sell it for $700 they advised—drug makers can’t go to regular suppliers. So I did. Try and get the rego of their car. Sure I will NOT! Don’t want the shop burned down to the ground!

But apple brandy I WILL make!

Back to Fameuse/Snow Apple I used the Orange Pippin pollination checker to look for pollination partners and found:

Cornish Aromatic

Quote:

An attractive late-season apple from Cornwall, with a good aromatic flavour.

https://www.orangepippintrees.co.uk/trees/apple-trees/late-season-eating-apples/cornish-aromatic

Like Fameuse, it is in the second Pollination Group. Not a bad tree to have.

Granny Smith, Pollination Group 3, can also pollinate Fameuse (some overlap between pollination groups.)

I have covered these techniques elsewhere here but in todays backyards space is limited so keep your fruit trees small by:

1. After planting the whip or feather—cut it off 45cm, knee height, from the ground. The scaffold branches from which everything grows are low so the tree is low.

2. Summer pruning for size.

3. Plant two related trees in the same hole, 45cm apart. Root competition will keep the trees small. Not suited for triploid trees—need to plant 3 trees in the same hole.


This way you can grow two apple trees in the space of one with excellent cross pollination.