EATING APPLES GET GROWING
NEW SERIES
Cropping period, pollination group, historical significance, local provenance… there are many criteria we can use when deciding which dessert apples we want to grow. And while these are all perfectly valid, the main factor is almost always flavour — a new tree is quite an investment of both time and money, so we need to be as sure as we can be that we’ll enjoy the fruit when it eventually appears. Which presents us with a conundrum — how to choose on taste, when we will never have the opportunity to actually taste before buying?
Supermarkets offer a very limited choice of fruit, and these are normally commercial varieties which wouldn’t be good choices for growing at home. So we end up staring at a long list of unfamiliar names such as ‘Irish Peach’ or ‘St Edmund’s Pippin’, and plumping for one we hope will be
