There are very few red fleshed apple varieties available in Australia at the moment. One is called 'Red Love'. Apparently there are a bunch of different apple varieties owned by Red Love overseas ('Redlove Calypso', 'Redlove Circe', 'Redlove Era', and 'Redlove Odysso'), I am not sure which one is present in Australia but I am told it tastes like a granny smith apple, sour and unimpressive. It looks pretty enough.
Another red fleshed apple in Australia is called the Huonville Crab, it is said to be the cross between a domestic apple and a crab apple. I am growing this one. Its
bark, leaves, and flowers look amazing, this apple tree would not look out of place in an ornamental garden.
This year my Huonville crab apple produced fruit, the birds got to some and knocked them off the tree early. There is a good chance that when the fruit are ripe I will forget to take any pictures, so I took pictures of the fruit the birds knocked off. Some of them had bits missing where the birds had eaten parts, so I cut these bits off for the picture.
The skin and flesh does get a little darker than the pictures below, they still had a month or two until they were ripe, but it gives you a good idea of what they will look like.
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| Huonville Crab Apple - deep red and shine up well |
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| Birds bit pieces, so I cut them off |
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| Huonville crab apple - red fleshed |
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| Red fleshed apple |
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| Huonville crab are quite a pretty apple |
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| The seeds were pink! |
Oh my goodness, I hadn't realised you were still continuing this blog now you had moved.
ReplyDeleteI've got two sticks/twigs of Huonville Crab grafted onto a Jonathan apple tree, grafted last spring. Interestingly, the leaves started off red and have now changed to green. It will be interesting to see what colour the apples are next year. I have wondered if the fact the rest of the tree has green sap (apparently Huonville Crab has red sap) is changing the colour of the leaves - which seems logical.
This coming spring I hope to be able to bud graft a Huonville Crab bud to a rootstock, so the entire tree is the one variety, and compare it to the grafted branches. Obviously, going to take a while to get to that point. :-)
Hi Melinda,
Deleteour last move was brutal, I am not sure that we have recovered from it yet. I have been writing a few blog posts since then, I even won Switzerland's flower blog awards earlier this year which was fun.
I love Huonville Crab, it is just such a great apple. The flowers are pretty and produced in huge numbers, it is diploid so pollinates itself and apparently it pollinates most other varieties of apple, the tree looks nice, the apples look great, I love their taste raw, and I am told they are great for cooking. The only things I would change is that they are a bit small for my liking (but perfect for kids) and the flesh goes a little brown when exposed to air for too long.
The leaves on my tree lose their red/purple colour as they age. New leaves are very dark but old leaves become purple/green, probably better described as more of a green than purple. It is beautiful when first leafed out but still a good looking tree late in the season.
I love to hear more about your grafting. I am self taught so probably don't do it the best way. Far too few people graft in Australia so it is difficult to find someone to learn from.