Apples

[hurleyjd]

Redgulley what varieties of Apples do you grow. Our favorite apple to eat is the Gala. We have not found any any better.

 

[kenny thomas]

Do you grow the Gala?

 

[Redgully]

I don't have many apples left now. Personally i reckon nothing beats a proper tree ripe Granny Smith. I do like gala, we grew royal gala and now have cherry gala. All taste the same. For sweetness fuji is the best but i like flavour over sweetness. I've never been a fan of the delicious varieties. I'm not particularly fond of pink lady, was a pig to grow but it produces. We actually had the very first trees of that in a commercial orchard way back in 1984 on trial. Growing up my favourite was winesap but very hard to get now. I have a tree but not the same as ones we had when i was young. There is a new apple here called bravo, nicknamed the black apple, turning out to be pretty good to eat.

 

[hurleyjd]

Do you grow the Gala?

I do not grow any apples they do not do very well here. Have had a few peach trees but now I am down to one. Bores do a job on the peaches and the trees die. Fig trees do very well and I have three of them. Love fig preserves but after type II diabetes I have to lay off of the sugar.

 

[jltrent]

The Gala and Granny Smith are good. I like the Golden Delicious apples when I can find them ripe. I bought a 1/2 bushel last week at the flea market.....they are just a little hard, but flavor is great. I can set them out for a couple weeks and they soften up.

 

[Lucky_P]

Went overboard planting apples when we bought this place - at one time had 60 different varieties. Some didn't belong here, others too susceptible to disease and pest pressure. I don't have time or inclination to do the sprays every 10 days or so throughout the growing season that it would take to get mostly decent fruit, so have removed or abandoned most of them, and replaced with pears, persimmons, mulberries.
MonArk, Centennial crab, Kerr crab, and Bastian Orange crabs are about the only ones we still pick & eat.
Any apple or pear ripening later than mid August has no prayer of making it...the big European hornets eat them all, and within the last year or two, crows and bluejays joined in the depredation.

 

[Dave]

We have two big old ancient apple trees here. One is a Yellow Delicious and the other is a Gravenstein. I like both of them. There is also a apricot tree of the same age. The apricots are as big as a big peach. We planted a pear and another apricot last spring. We will plant more trees next year. We were late getting started and didn't find a good source for the trees. I like planting fruit trees. It is like leaving a legacy. People will be eating the fruit long after we are gone.

 

[Ky hills]

We have a June apple tree, wish we did have some good eating apples, the June apples are ok to cook or make sauce but too tart and mealy textured for my liking. I like the Fuji and gala apples pretty good, I don’t like red delicious at all, but probably yellow delicious or grimes golden are my favorites of the older readily available varieties. Seems like everybody has been bragging on honey crisps but haven’t tried that yet. We had a white peach tree but wind took it down last year. The borers have been pretty hard n our trees too.