Those are the biggest crabapples I’ve ever seen, if that’s the case. They’re bigger than a golf ball, though still smaller than a baseball. I sampled a windfall this morning, and while it clearly wasn’t ripe, it was starting to develop an apple sweetness, certainly moreso than the windfall I tasted a few weeks ago.
When we moved in, this tree was a mess. We had it pruned last year, and didn’t expect to get anything. Wrong! We had tons of flowers, both pink and white, and then a spectacular fruit set from the white ones. There are still some fruit on the back of the tree, where the pink flowers were, but those are much tinier and do look like crabapples. My best guess is that most of the tree is apple, but that there was some growth from below the graft early in the tree’s history. The leaves on that part of the tree are different too.
The tree shed about half the fruit in mid-June. What I haven’t tidied up, the local wildlife has been feasting on, mostly in the form of roly-polys. That’s okay, it keeps them out of my veggie garden. (Who knew roly-polys liked bean sprouts so much? Jeez!)
Apple season around here is September, so we’ve got about five to six weeks before we’ll really have a good grasp on what we have. Maybe a touch longer. I’m excited to find out, though.
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