Donator — she/her/hers
Posted 2 years ago ( 2022/11/12 13:41:50 )
@justice: It definitely depends on the apple and the season! Last year (not this past season, but the one before) here in New England, we had a very wet summer, and the apples were all huge and very flavorful. I ended up with some of the largest Golden Delicious apples I'd ever seen hanging on a tree, and they were quite good and flavorful. Some apples are also just larger as a variety, so "big" specimens of them are actually just normal. Mutsu and Jonagold are great examples of this. They are almost universally huge because they're triploid varieties, so they just come that way. Honeycrisp and Cosmic Crisp are on the larger side, and it also helps that they have less dense flesh, so if they swell with extra water then it's kind of just how they already are. Cosmic Crisp is great because it's a keeper. They bred Honeycrisp with Enterprise to get it, and Enterprise can last nearly a year in storage, so apples that are good for long storage will keep more flavor as well. This is one of the reasons apples are so special to me: so much can into how they taste, and there's this simultaneous possibility for heartache that you had a terrible year of work, but also the possibility of triumph that you worked hard all year and the crop came out great!
@feralgaythem: Try MN55 cultivar! (It's marketed as Rave or First Kiss in the U.S., I'm not sure about elsewhere.)