New cultivar - RedLove apple

Breed from Swiss researcher Markus Kobelt after a twenty year program.  Scab resistant and has more antioxidants. 

Links

http://www.naturalnews.com/032326_selective_breeding_GMOs.html

http://www.tgdaily.com/general-science-brief/55827-swiss-researcher-shows-natural-breeding-better-than-gmos


Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAmYOVxvkDs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8bxf6u6XBI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpmycbNqgjM&feature=player_embedded

I have an apple growing in my backyard which is red-fleshed, good raw or cooked, and higher in antioxidants than white-fleshed apples (all red-fleshed apples share this distinction.)

It's an airlie red-fleshed apple, and the variety has been around since the 1950s AFAIK.

http://www.orangepippin.com/apples/aerlies-red-fleshed

Red-fleshed apples are all the rage, both for their novelty value and because they contain high amounts of anthocyanin, an antioxidant.

There are roughly a thousand varieties of apple currently in cultivation, not counting crabapples. Storage apples and fresh eating apples, cider apples and sauce apples, apples that taste like cinnamon and apples that taste like bananas. And none of them genetically modified.

A Canadian firm has been working on a GMO apple the flesh of which is slow to brown after being cut.

They should give it up. The apple of their dreams was developed by conventional methods a century ago; It is a Ben Davis/Macintosh cross called a Cortland. Still grown in the NY area, and yummy.

I love apples; I wish I had a large orchard full of them. I'd love to grow 20 or 30 varieties that nobody has heard of, just to blow people's minds with the awesome taste experiences available from this fruit. Most folks today have no idea how diverse and wonderful this species can be, since big agra only provides a half-dozen or so varieties to the supermarket chains. Those supermarket varieties are selected not for flavor, but for appearance, longevity in storage, and durability in shipping.

I think I'm in love. Beautiful apple.

Thanks for the input on the red apple varieties.  I am on a quest to find great tasting and disease resistant apple varieties.  Permaculture is very harsh on current susceptible apple cultivars. 

Amedean wrote:
Thanks for the input on the red apple varieties.  I am on a quest to find great tasting and disease resistant apple varieties.  Permaculture is very harsh on current susceptible apple cultivars.   

I don't understand why permaculture is harsh on apples. Permaculture methods should help them flourish. I am growing three  apple trees in my back yard and they are all doing well. Mine are surrounded by walking onions, garlic chives, various insectaries and, where the soil is really poor, Siberian pea shrub and autumn olive.

This site http://www.treesofantiquity.com/

may help you with your quest. It's a wonderful site for heirloom apple varieties.

Permaculture is harsh because apples are very insect / disease prone and require regular spraying to protect the fruit.  The farm apple is not a natural creation from nature, it is a product mans selective production.  Apples from seed produce an unpredictable fruit quality which may very in size and range from slightly sweet to incredibly sour or tart.  I love permaculture because it is the most efficient method but the truth is that a lot of plants breed by man that require human stabilization.  The truth is that there is no way to fully protect susceptible plants with monoculture or permaculture, look up the history of the American chestnut tree.

Amedean wrote:
Permaculture is harsh because apples are very insect / disease prone and require regular spraying to protect the fruit.  The farm apple is not a natural creation from nature, it is a product mans selective production.  Apples from seed produce an unpredictable fruit quality which may very in size and range from slightly sweet to incredibly sour or tart.  I love permaculture because it is the most efficient method but the truth is that a lot of plants breed by man that require human stabilization.  The truth is that there is no way to fully protect susceptible plants with monoculture or permaculture, look up the history of the American chestnut tree.

I have friends who use no sprays or other toxic chemicals on their apples. One runs an orchard that has been in the family for generations. There's an occasional bug-hole in the apples. We eat around them. Another has developed a moth trap for his apple trees made out of gallon milk jugs, with a water/cider vinegar/molasses solution inside as a combination bait and moth-killer.

I would suspect the area is not prone to susceptible diseases or the cultivar is resistant.  Thanks for sharing some of your experiences with pest control.  I would love to use similar traps, but chasing efficiency I am searching for the ultimate maintenance free solution.

I think it was in another thread on this site that I read about malus sieversii, the ancestor of all modern apples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malus_sieversii

There are many disease-resistant varieties of apples.