These are the apple varieties available for grafting at the Benevolence Orchard & Gardens grafting workshop on Saturday, April 6, 2024

Akane       From orangepippin.com: "Akane is useful early season apple with an unusually good balance of sweet and sharp flavors. The flesh is firm rather than crisp, but with plenty of juice."

Ashmeads Kernel       Russeted apple. From orangepippin.com: "Ashmeads Kernel has remained popular for well over 2 centuries, and with good reason: it has a distinctive flavour which is quite different from most other varieties."

Baldwin       Good keeper, juice valuable in hard cider, and it does well here in the Boulder area.

Blanc Mollet       French bittersweet hard cider apple from the 1700s.

Cortland       A McIntosh-like apple. Good for juice and fresh eating when perfectly ripe, but doesn’t store as well as some.

Duchess of Oldenburg       1700s Russian apple, early season. One of the apples used to breed Honeycrisp.

Esopus Spitzenburg       Late 1700s New York apple. Very good eating apple. Keeps well.

Fireside       Good for pies, sauce, and fresh eating. Ripens later in the harvest season.

Freedom       Good for fresh eating and pies. One source recommends it highly as a dried apple. Resistant to two diseases, scab and cedar apple rust, that aren’t big problems here.

Gold Star       Pomiferous: "Moderately sweet with some tartness and perfumed, fruity aroma."

Golden Russet       Eric’s favorite apple — if I could only eat one apple ever again, I’d choose this one. Dense, bursting with flavor. High BRIX makes it valuable for hard cider. Grows well in the Boulder area. Late harvest season.

Grimes Golden       One of the parents of Golden Delicious. Unlike most apple cultivars, it is partially self-fertile and does not require another nearby tree for pollination.

Gros Frequin       Bittersweet hard cider apple. Gros Frequin has done well on the West Slope and we are trialing it here.

Harrison       Although considered a hard cider apple, I like Harrison for eating out of hand.

Hewe’s Virginia       A smaller-sized apple (sometimes called a crab), Hewe’s has notable astringency and is excellent in hard cider. I also like to eat this variety fresh, however.

Kingston Black       A bittersharp hard cider apple.

Liberty       A McIntosh-like apple. Useful for fresh eating and in hard cider.

Mutsu       Mutsu, also called Crispin, is a Japanese variety. It is like a very large Golden Delicious. Good cooking apple and very good for fresh eating. The largest apple I ever saw was a Mutsu, in California.

Prairie Spy       Prairie Spy is an early University of Minnesota apple that is very cold hardy. It would be a good one to try in mountain locations. Good eating apple.

Six-finger Jack       Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project in southwest CO has preserved and propagated this apple. It has a very high BRIX and would likely be good in hard cider.

Smokehouse       A fine cooking and eating apple that keeps very well into the late Winter.

State Fair       Summer apple. Very good when perfectly ripe, but doesn’t keep for a long time. A good choice for a small orchard that needs apples of various ripening times.

Sweet Sixteen       A fireblight-resistant mid-season ripening apple. From the University of Minnesota, so it puts up with cold climates.

Wealthy       Good for many uses. Commonly found on old homesteads on the Great Plains.

Wolf River       A very large apple very good for cooking. Very cold tolerant.

Here’s a how-to for the folks who came to our 2023 grafting event at Benevolence Orchard:

https://www.widespreadmalus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/care_of_trees.pdf

*NOTE, January 1, 2023: PI 657118 is now known to be a hybrid of Malus sieversii and Malus domestica, NOT pure Malus sieversii.

We do. That’s all of them, right there. PI 657118, obtained from USDA and grafted in 2016 on highly-dwarfing Budogovsky 9 rootstock, produced four apples this year, still living in a 3-gallon pot. Granted, it’s not much seed, but it’s the first from the trees we grafted ourselves (we’ve had a bit of seed already from a purchased Malus sieversii tree). It’s a start.

PI 657118 is from Kazakhstan, close to the Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan borders. The pollen parent for our small seed harvest is not known.

I was surprised we had any fruit at all this year, given the April plunge that pretty much ruined the local crop. We are poised to produce more seed than this; the trees at the orchard, which will be in their sixth growing season in 2021, should have a crop the next year we have favorable weather.

This post is mostly just a “Wheee! We did it!” item. Growing wild apples is a way to protect genetic diversity that may be especially important for breeding new apple cultivars in a time of climate change. It’s also fun.

If you happen to be interested in Malus sieversii, we do have a few seeds to share, but there are still better options at this point. Contact the people in charge of the national apple collection at Geneva, NY. Last time I checked they’d still send 100 seeds (25 from each of 4 mother trees) to any interested person, free. Instructions for germination and care are included. Google around to find them, or feel free to email, and I’ll send you the contact info.

I’m propagating a couple of interesting apricots.

One is/was the co-state champion tree for Colorado, with a trunk much larger than I can get my arms around, but it’s in severe decline. I grafted a copy in about 2014 that’s now reached bearing age.  Apparently the original is well over a century old. It is also more reliable than any other apricot I’ve seen in the Boulder area, producing a few fruits during many years that other apricots are barren.  In 2008 we made quite a bit of jam from groundfalls. (Visit this tree on the north side of the West Senior Center in downtown Boulder).

The other is from 8100′ in Garfield County, next to a dirt road, two thousand feet above the Colorado River. This had fruit when I first noticed it in the summer of about 2003. It bore a good crop a couple of years ago. This tree is in quite a xeric spot — dry hillside, south facing — but has been doing pretty well there. As with the other tree, fruits are small, but good-tasting.

This apricot tree, at 8100′ elevation on the Coffee Pot Road in Garfield County, is the highest fruiting apricot I’ve yet seen in Colorado.

I’d like to get both of these trees grafted onto rootstocks and distributed to several interested, experienced gardeners/fruit growers.  For this next round of propagation, I want to ensure the continuation of these varieties, but in future years I think it would be great to see them more widely distributed.

If you are in the (general) Boulder/Denver area, and are interested in growing one or both of these, please contact me (Eric) and let me know a  bit about you and your experience with fruit growing.  It’s conceivable I’ll have some small trees in 2021, but due to a delay in receiving some rootstocks, it could be 2022.

Short of providing actual trees, I’m also happy to provide dormant scions/budwood or Summer budwood.  Let me know if that’s of interest.