Homescale Apple Breeding: Labeling the Seedlings and Amazing Red Fall Colors

Below is todays video, the latest installment in the now year and a half long homescale apple breeding project.  We started at pollinating some blossoms in Spring of 2015, and now the trees are waiting another couple of months to be grafted out.  Labeling is important because it is what allows me to keep track of each tree and to take notes on the apples as they begin to grow and fruit.  The identifier code also tells me what the parents are and what year the pollination was made.

The fall colors on some of these seedlings is remarkable.  All of the extremely red leaved seedlings have maypole as one parent.  It is the most red fleshed apple I've used, but it also has very red leaves, flowers, bark and even some red in the wood.  The downside is that, it is a very primitive apple with a lot of puckery tannins.  The flavor is excellent, but it is pretty rough around the edges, and low in sugar on top of it.

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imagine these all grafted onto one tree for fall color effect.

One neat thing about Maypole is that it is a columnar style tree.  That means it grows very upright and narrow.  Not a single stem, but it has a very small footprint.  It is also dwarfed, so it will never grow very tall.  If I recall correctly, I think the columnar trait is dominant.  So that will be interesting to watch for as these guys grow out.

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One of the apples I crossed Maypole with is Wickson, which can get up to 25% sugar, the most I've ever heard of for an apple, so hopefully one of those 14 crosses might yield something sweeter.  If nothing really eminently edible comes of those, they might still make good puckery cider apples if the sugar is raised, or something to use in further breeding.  Because, remember, each new seedling is a product of both of it's parents, and carries a large compliment of Genes hiding within.  If the high sugar trait does not express in the first generation, it may in a second generation, especially if it is back crossed to Wickson, or another Wickson seedling.  Stay tuned for 5 or 6 years to find out!

and here is the entire series on this project...

Tasting a Couple of New Seedling Apples with Mark Albert

While at Mark's Albert's house shooting the pineapple guava video, we sat down and tasted a couple of my new seedling apples, one of which has red flesh.  I'm a little more positive about the red fleshed apple now than I was at the time.  It developed a bit more sugar after spending a little more time in the fridge.  It's not going to be an outstanding desert apple, but I would think now there's a chance it will outperform Grenadine.  It looks better I think.  It's a very attractive apple.  The flavor is quite nice.  After that we tasted some varietal grapes and Glenora grape juice and chatted about grapes a bit.

Tasting 17 Apples in November and Looking at New Seedling Apples

I went out and picked what apples were available to taste this past week.  There were a few good'ns in there.  More exciting is a couple of my seedlings that are looking rather nice.  You can tell some things about an apple by just feeling it and looking at it.  A couple just look like they are going to be hard dry fleshed and bitter.  The one I taste in this video obviously looks more like something you'd expect to be eating.  The most exciting though is a very red and beautiful apple which colored up amazingly even in nearly complete shade covered with stocking material to protect it from birds.  Typically fruit colors up better with light.  It is a cross between Grenadine and Lady Williams.  Both are late apples and this may be a very late apple, though I'm inclined to think it is approaching ripeness fairly soon.  

You can't judge an apple by it's cover.  We certainly learned that from the red delicious era when strains of it were selected for better and better looking apples with worse and worse flavor and texture.  But I'm hopeful for something tasty out of this with red flesh.  The odds are against it of course.  Most of my apple seedlings will be between mediocre, such as the one I taste in this video, and just plain bad.  But even with the primitive, unrefined apples carrying undesirable characteristics that I'm using in many of my crosses, more will be edible than not and I'm expecting at least a smattering of apples worthy of further propagation by someone.  This apple bears so much resemblance to Grenadine, that I'm hoping it has inherited it's beautiful and flavorful red flesh.  Check it out.

There is more than a passing resemblance between this seedling and it's seed parent grenadine.

The thing is that the red skin of grenadine is actually from the color of the flesh showing through the translucent skin.  My hope beyond hope is that this is the case with the seedling.  It seems unlikely though.  We'll find out soon enough.

In the video I taste wickson, amberoso, crabby lady, king wickson, muscat de venus, something that may be katherine, something that may be ashmead's kernel, bedford pippin,high cross pippin, claygate pearmain, one of my seedlings, pink parfait, gold rush and others.