Welcome to the New Apples Forum!

We have a new forum all about apples! Come check it out!

https://permies.com/f/432/apples


Kick off your shoes and bask in all that is appledom!

Here's some awesome looking old timey apples just for fun!

I like apples but can't eat them. At least not from the grocery stores, local markets or "organic". For some reason, any variety I have tried over many years, always leave the corners of my mouth sore. Like my skin is splitting and it hurts. However, when  I pick abandoned , imperfect apples from some old uncared tree, I am fine, and my mouth doesn't hurt.

Ela La Salle wrote:I like apples but can't eat them. At least not from the grocery stores, local markets or "organic". For some reason, any variety I have tried over many years, always leave the corners of my mouth sore. Like my skin is splitting and it hurts. However, when  I pick abandoned , imperfect apples from some old uncared tree, I am fine, and my mouth doesn't hurt.

I have the exact problem with bananas. A few varieties I can eat, but others (Cavendish and derivatives, I guess) have the same alergic reaction. I'd suggest go find some of these apple varieties you are not alergic to and try to have a few of them growing again, if you have the resources.

I was loosely involved in some village apple jiucing days last autumn. One village we went to had been part of a project called The People's Orchard a couple of years before. The love for this, and in depth knowledge of local varieties and micro climate really came through. The villagers had learnt many skills such as pruning to restore old trees.
In particular I was struck by the thoughtful detailed knowledge theyd accrued around local provenance and sites.
Pic aderyn (birds beak) was the most favoured, old adapted variety.
The project also ensured apple trees were planted throughout the villagers gardens, in effect The People's Orchard, both in terms of knowledge and heritage and place, and actually fruit trees.
More projects like this would be great.

Pigyn aderyn image:

Just in time!
I have an allotment garden now with two apple trees already in it. And a lot of bushes and perennials, I don't know what. The person who rented it before was trying permaculture too (I will try better).

One apple tree close by, the other one in the far corner.

Ela La Salle wrote:I like apples but can't eat them. At least not from the grocery stores, local markets or "organic". For some reason, any variety I have tried over many years, always leave the corners of my mouth sore. Like my skin is splitting and it hurts. However, when  I pick abandoned , imperfect apples from some old uncared tree, I am fine, and my mouth doesn't hurt.

Maybe you’re related to a daffodil, the bulbs can’t be stored with apples or it will render them useless A fact I recently learned.

whilst juicing some apples a couple of years ago, we got lazy and left a pile of pomace lying in the garden. The next year about 20 small seedlings appeared. I planted up most of them planning to graft over them with organic cultivars.Apples are probably the easiest trees to graft so I ended up with quite a few different ones, getting budwood from friends gardens and our local park. In 3 years, I had fruit forming which I took off to help the trees establish. I have read that it is better to use a vigorous rootstock and control the vigour by summer pruning and keeping the tree to no more tan your own height. All in all, this has worked out very well.I guess I should have taken a gamble with a couple of seedlings and let them grow without grafting, but I know the chances are slim, plenty of roadside trees that produce awful small fruit!

Ela La Salle wrote:I like apples but can't eat them. At least not from the grocery stores, local markets or "organic". For some reason, any variety I have tried over many years, always leave the corners of my mouth sore. Like my skin is splitting and it hurts. However, when  I pick abandoned , imperfect apples from some old uncared tree, I am fine, and my mouth doesn't hurt.

I developed this same issue! I sold real estate, and I initially noticed the same thing - i could eat an apple off a tree in a forgotten corner of an old homestead, but ones from the store were like sucking on razors.  

It got worse for a few years and eventually happened with all fruit (no matter where it came from) except green grapes. My lips would split at the corners first, but eventually the entire lips would split and become bloody.  At the time it was thought to be either "burning lips syndrome" or "oral allergy syndrome". Whatever it was, I'm healed now, thank heavens! Almost totally, that is.  There are now just a few apple varieties that are still a problem.  I cannot risk tasting an Opal apple, I've found; in fact, I don't do well with most yellow skinned ones.  But I can eat red and green skinned ones, and golden russet types as well.  Russet are the best, imo.  Ohh a good golden russet apple.  Hard to find.  I'm from Oregon, which has a wide diversity of apple varieties available, so I've tasted dozens and dozens including many feral ones on country properties. They are so delightful.

How I healed - I had to do a few things - heal my gut, get out of a big exposure that was fundamentally irritating me (a moldy house), and rebuild gut flora after getting candida under control.   Anyways, there you go in case that ever becomes useful to you.

I love this thread.  I have tabs open on my browsers, clogging them up, of apple-related things I wanted to post!!!  I'll do that in a few separate posts, because the topic is not at all allergy related.

Let's start with:

Forgotten Fruits Manual & Manifesto: APPLES, compiled and edited by Gary Nabhan

And a quote to sum up the problem:

Of some 15,000 to 16,000 apple varieties that have  been  named,  grown  and  eaten  on  the North American continent, only about 3,000 remain accessible to American orchard keep-ers, gardeners, chefs  and  home cooks. An estimated four out of five apples  varieties unique to North America (80 percent) have been lost from commerce.

In this manual, you can read about:

A brief history of apple diversity in America
The rate of loss of apple diversity
Changes in the nursery trade and their impact on apples (including tables showing what companies still have a wide diversity of apple varieties available as of 2009)  
A map showing which regions currently have the greatest apple diversity, and which have the highest apple acreage. This is a neat map - it made me realize how I've been so lucky to try so many apples.
How to find and preserve unique varieties of apples

This is really great stuff if you want to dive deep into the world of apples.

One thing I'm wondering is why One Green world didn't make the list of nurseries with a lot of apple diversity.  I thought they have a lot.  It would be good to update that list, since 2009 is now a ways away.

My girlfriend has a large old apple tree that, in a good year, produces well, not sure what kind they are. She takes boxes full to a harvest festival where they can be turned into cider. We also make applesauce to can. One year we unwisely put a bunch of skins in the compost barrel.  A bear tore the handle off and dumped everything out and had a feast. Lessons learned.

Want to learn about apple grafting and breeding?  Do you have a love of new flavors and colors, and a sense of long term adventure? (It also helps if you: 1. own land, 2. get as excited about taste tests as children are for Christmas morning, and 3. being interested in making cider is another bonus, because if you breed apples, you will end up with a LOT of apples.)

First, for apple grafting, I really like Steven Edholms videos and written explanations on just about everything.  He's good at explaining.

Skillcult website all about grafting, including many step-by-step videos

He also sells apple and pear scions, including my very favorite apple, the Golden Russet:  Skillcult apple and pear scion wood

He did a video series on apple breeding for amateurs:



Sells apple pollen:  Apple pollen for sale from Skillcult

And he's bred a bunch of new apples!  He seems to be specializing in red fleshed types. Here's a picture of some of his apples, including a new crabapple he calls cherub:

A cut Cherub in a collection of other seedlings from my breeding project.  The flesh color seems to vary a lot, but that is fairly typical of red fleshed apples.

And he gives the best tasting descriptions I've ever read. This is important to me, helps me pick a good apple variety.  The fact that he and I agree that Golden Russet is a superior tasting variety creates a great baseline of understanding for me.

Here is an example of his tasting notes form over the years, written: From Old Nonpareil to Lady Williams: Apple tasting notes, late season 2012/2013

And if you prefer videos:


Ahhh, apples.  What a wonderful fruit.

Apples are my favorite and most wonderful fruit.  My spirit fruit.  An apple forum is my new home away from home :)


My dog calls apple season, "ball season".  its the cutest and also most arm tiring time of the year.  throwing endless balls(apples)

After much discussion with Ruth, I cooked our last Bramley last Sunday. I got my wish to have an apple pie, only the apple was too small (barely ¾lb) for a whole pie, so we added some blackcurrants and blackberries. That was the last of its kind . . . until September.
The Bramley is the commonest cooking apple in this country; it has lots of malic acid so it stands up well to being cooked. One thing I do with it is to stew it, to go with pork etc. Cut it into small pieces and let it stand over the lowest gas I can manage. It takes anything from 15 to 30 min depending on how much apple is in the pan. They start off green but as October passes they develop reddish stripes and a subtler flavour. They will keep in the shed until this time of year. Baked apples in September are firm and tart; if I had any apples left now they would have a much more delicate flavour and go fluffy in baking, after being stored.
¾lb=340g.

So I am in Northern Mongolia, very near the Russian border. We are zone 2/3 by temps and vegetation that I see here. We started a permaculture project here about 7 years ago and are hoping to develop new fruit varieties, that are viable in this climate, through cross pollination and seed propagation. Being zone 2/3 really narrows the selection of cultivar choices available to us, particularly if you want larger apples. So the names of our apples will not be familiar to most people, unless you live in colder climates.  We currently have about 50 varieties of apples that we are working with, with fruit size ranging from 0.6cm to 8.5cm. Most of our varieties have their origins in the Canadian prairies and the northern US states. We also have a number of Russian varieties from Siberia. We have wild Malus baccata (Siberian Crabapple) growing right in our area and we are collecting seeds from these trees and are growing these as rootstocks for grafting. We grafted our first trees in 2015 with the Rescue apple and these started fruiting 2 years ago. This last year, 2020, 5 more varieties started to produce fruit with one tree producing a 235g apple. To date, Rescue and September Ruby have been the best performers. We are currently developing an overgrazed 10ha piece of land, using "indigenized" permaculture methods. We are hoping to develop a number of food forest areas within this area and apples will be one of the main fruit components. We are strong proponents of the need for diversity in fruit (plant) genetics and as such we are collecting all the seeds from our fruit and growing it out with the goal of producing more indigenous, locally adapted fruit varieties. We currently have 6 apple varieties flowering and they are mixing with the local baccata genetics to produce ??? So much FUN! To date we have grown several thousand Baccatas and we can see that there is a fair bit of genetic variability within  this group even though they have been growing in isolation from all other Malus species.The fruit on one tree, picture attached, was very unique in that all the fruit grew as doublets or triplets. We have collected the seed from these and will see if this is a characteristic that will reproduce.
We are also in line to potentially get some wild Malus sieversii seeds (Kazakhstan sourced) this fall.
There had been a link posted to the apple forum about getting Malus sieversii germplasm material from the USDA site in Geneva, New York. I followed this up and eventually got a response saying that their Geneva site had had a fire blight "pandemic" this last year and as such no grafting material would be shipped in the near future. I had also heard that they were giving out M.sieversii seed, collected from a planted stand of 1000+ trees, to people who were interested. After a bit more chasing I made a connection with the "Botany of Desire Seed Program" and it is from this program that these seeds are made available. For anyone interested in such seedy stuff the person to contact is Dawn Dellafave (dawn.dellefave@usda.gov).