Show Us Your Cider Trees

[TimT]

We've got a lot of apples in our garden. A Pink Lady and a Granny Smith (both of those are all right for cider, plenty of tannins in 'em) out front, a Huonville Crab Apple out back (that last one not a real crab apple; it grows big and sweet and juicy vermillion apples; their flesh is even partly vermillion. I'm not sure how good they are for cider). The Huonville crab apple has only had one good apple this year (and we've already eaten that, it seems to be an early fruiting variety), but the Granny Smith and the Pink Lady are burgeoning with fruit at the moment and will give us a decent yield in a week or so. They're still too young to produce enough apples for cider though, so most of those will be just for the table or dessert. Though I did have thoughts on getting wild yeast from the peelings of one of them ....

Also -
Polka (a Ballerina apple)
Bolero (a Ballerina apple)
Charlotte (a Ballerina apple)
Flamenco (a Ballerina apple)
Waltz (a Ballerina apple)

Ordering in, to be planted as step-over espaliers this winter:
Berner Rosen
Boswell
Fuji
Opalescent
Pome de Neige
Cox's Orange Pippin

We have a long term plan to find some grafts so we can have multiple varieties on one tree.

Gotta be a cider apple or two in that lot!

 

[Ferg]

Cox's Orange Pippin makes a good one apparently...

I've had the most random year with my cider apples and apples & pears in general. The pear trees where I normally get way more than I can handle have nothing this year. There are 5 of them, about 100 years old and literally 15m tall. Not one pear. I don't know if it was birds or the extreme heat we had in Jan or maybe drought.. Some of my cider trees (Dabinette) never broke dormancy in spring and I was worried they were dead. Finally they did around Christmas time and now have baby apples on them. Others have just started flowering for a second time. To be honest im a bit stumped!

 

[TimT]

Ferg, our garden is still young, but we noticed some weirdness too. It's the first fruitful year for our pears (a Nashi and a Beurre Bosc) and I've been pleased with the harvest from both of them - the Nashi has been prolific, the Beurre Bosc has only produced about seven or so but still, it's still gathering strength.

Two of our apples out front, the Pink Lady and Granny Smith, have produced satisfying crops, but apparently they were stumped by the weather too, and flowered at odd, random intervals, producing a few apples way too early (maybe confused by the variable weather in the winter). Still, not bad for young trees.

 

[Greg.L]

I have some young Dabinett (no e) and they do seem very reluctant to leaf out, maybe they're not such a good variety for Australia. I had severe late spring crops which ruined my crop, but the cider cultivars flower very late which should be good when they are bigger. I had a few apples but they got a bit "cooked" on the tree in the summer heat, a lot of sunburn which they never get in England. Then the late season rain, didn't help my vineyard but the apple trees appreciated it, a bit of spot flowering which is normal in this sort of year. I got a few pears, they seem a bit more frost resistant than apples. not enough for cider but made some good pear jam.

 

[Deep End]

I planted a Bramley, Yarlington Mill and a Brown Snout late this winter. The first two have burst into leaf as spring is rolling on, but the Brown Snout has yet to show any signs of life. I hope I didn't buy a stick! It was the healthier looking of the three and I honestly thought the Yarlington would fail as it was a clearance tree and wasn't looking real good, but its off and racing. I can only hope the Brown Snout is a late starter as that was the one out of the three I was really hoping would grow well.

 

[Ferg]

All my trees are out in leaf bar the dabinett (no e ) again... Plenty of flowers and plenty of bees, I may need to do some thinning to protect the younger trees or maybe some more well placed stakes would do the trick?
Delighted also that my failed graft that I bought from the nursery has been resurrected with a bit of sticky tape and a Kingston Black off cut!

 

[Sambrew]

After picking! got a great crop this year! Netted the tree and had very few drop!

 

[Yeastfridge]

It's now the time of year when you need to plan new cider apple trees. If you want to raise your own trees it is a good time to sow apple seeds for rootstocks.

Reviving this thread!
I've got two small seedling trees that I started growing last year. I kept them in a pretty bad spot in small pots and as a result they're still pretty tiny - they'd be no more than 8mm thick on one tree and 10mm thick at the base on the other. Is that too small to graft on to?

I live in Sydney and don't get any frost (I sprout my seeds by wrapping them in paper towel and keeping them sealed in the fridge) but I would love to grow some cider apples, so am thinking about raising seedling apples here and grafting them with cider scions, then by the time those are a year or two old I will have convinced some friends in the Southern Highlands or Orange to plant them out. If that doesn't work out I know a few spots where there are roadside apples that I could potentially plant the trees next to (so they have pollinating buddies). What does everyone think of this plan? My only worry is that thus far it doesn't look like my seedling trees are going to go dormant...

Regarding pollination - If I have two trees of the same variety that produce viable pollen, will they pollinate each other, or do I need two separate varieties so that the pollens are different?

I had a really good roadside wildling-apple haul this year - I've bottled one 250kg batch from the early-ripening haul (didn't age the apples so they were 12.7 brix/OG 1.051) and the late ripening batch, also around 250kg, is still fermenting away now (they sat around for three weeks before milling and although i lost about 5kg and ate or cooked another 5-10, they went from 13 to 15 brix/OG 1.061).

 

[Yeastfridge]

Bump! Anyone around?

 

[Muzduk]

wouldn't worry too much about the pollination factor if as you say you are in proximity to roadside varities etc

 

[Yeastfridge]

Anybody out there willing to sell me some cider scions?!