The large apple weighs in at about 3/4 of a pound. For comparison the other is a normal size Sunset. The big one is an old variety called Catshead, because of its shape. It is a cooker. Draw back is that it has a hollow centre which is the favourite home of an earwig or three. We picked most of the tree, say about 100 lbs!
That's a whopper Eric!! A pity the centre houses earwigs though - not a favourite insect of mine. Have you decided what to do with all those apples you've picked? I made crumbles and apple sauce out of mine but I didn't have anywhere near 100lbs of fruit to contend with.
Those plus the 500 lbs or so off the other trees will be juiced, pureed and frozen, baked and frozen, eaten raw and finally if they go off shared with the blackbirds etc in Winter.
Holey Moley! I'm assuming this isn't genetically modified at all?? Would be interested in knowing if they taste any different. __________________ Lawyers Hamilton WLB
Do not know of any 'genetically modified' apple trees, except in as much as all Apple trees have been genetically modified by breeding from the original ,so long ago no one is really sure what the original was. Tastes just like any other cooking apple to me. It certainly is a very old variety of apple. Cannot find the date for it at present.
I do miss cooking apples. Yours looks lovely, Palustris. We've only got two apple trees outside, and they're both for eating. I would like more but we haven't got room for them.
Whoa! That is huge! Congratulations on the hefty harvest! I hope I can also have some sort of big haul some time. moderator's note: removed website link, see point 1.1 of usage rules
Boy could I make lots of apple sauce with that bugger . Hollow or not, it still has lots of good stuff. Oh how I love apples.. b
We have 9 apple trees, but Catshead is the only one which produces apples as big as that. The Bramley apple is about half that size. This years harvest was particularly good, we reckon that we got somewhere in the region of 700 lbs from all the trees together. These we have either pureed and frozen for future use or stored again for winter use. We juice a lot of them to drink. The puree I either eat with other fruit as a dessert or it is used as a sugar substitute in various cakes. We actually eat very little pork so apple sauce is a non-starter. Only trouble now is that the field mice have moved into the Apple store and they do a lot of damage. They take bites out of apples which then rot. We also put out a lot of the less usable fruit throughout the winter as a source of food for various birds in the garden. So, very little of our harvest gets wasted.
Could you possibly share some seeds of the Catshed apple? I planted gala seeds an it is about 6 foot tall now... Hope it is hardy.. Gala was. b
