Early apple varieties to grow and avoid 

I remember Beauty of Bath well, as a child, because of my Mother's excitement when they became available but every year, upon biting into one, I was disappointed and couldn't understand my Mother's joy. I live in Co.Armagh, the Orchard County and apple-growing centre of Ireland, so I am used to good apples and Beauty of Bath confused me but, now, your explanation makes perfect sense. Great video. Best Wishes, Brendan.

I know that I am late to this party, but yet another great video. Stephen, you are a real source of inspiration to budding apple growers like me.

Absolutely love the ending "Stephen, How about picking some apples!" :D

This video was new to me. But it was enjoyable, informative, and I quite like the numerical details you sometimes give. The mountain town my parents lived in, had a neighbourhood in which houses were built in an abandoned apple orchard. All the surviving apple trees were badly neglected. Passers by who picked fruit were always disappointed. The apples were small, dry and hard. Just right for children to throw at things, and eachother. Unlike my present town, even the deer would hardly touch them! Neglected Apple trees are so sad, when they could bring so much joy!

Thank you Stephen. You have been an inspiration to me and my small garden with 2 cherries, 2 pears and 4 apple trees. Good luck with your other interests and orchard work.

These early apples are important, their genetics must be conserved. Lets just be realudtic about shelf life and texture. I cite Beauty of Bath as we have found that old timers have false memories about how good it was. Input thhis down to nostalgia and the pre-refrigeration era when apples were hard to find outside their normal season and people were grateful for anything.

Glad to hear the scions took. Your helpful comment just underlines that early apples are worth having but have to be picked and eaten at just the right time. I think it is worth having some early apples, it will be far more important in a post-peak oil future when refrigeration cannot be taken for granted. Its amazing how many people I meet don't realise that apples have different natural seasons of ripeness. That's one reason I promote May Queen to be more widely grown, a great late keeper.

thank you bob .good to here from people who grow this one.cheers

You have interesting voice. A good one for, in my opinion,creating audio books for the blind. I am sure you heard this before. I watch your videos to hear your voice, interesting.

Awesome reference video mate. I'm a new comer to the apple world. After watching your vid I just ordered a Ribston Pippin from my local heritage apple supplier. Cheers Andy, Tasmania.

I had the same exact thought. Transparent is one of my favorite apples, for about 48 hours per year. I picked a couple every day over a two week period, about 15% were acceptable and 15% were amazing. The rest were either sharp as hell or had the texture of cotton wool.

Haha i love how much you hate that apple variety yet you still keep it around, so sweet

We have colder winter here in the Appalachian Mts, our first apple is the June apple, which ripens in mid June.

Hi Stephen, thanks for the scion wood again. In particular May Queen and Mrs Philimre are doing good :-). To BoB: we grow Beauty of Bath here in northern Germany. It has a soft texture but gets a sweet-sour (Elstar - like) flavor here. You can store the apple for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator given you had the right picking time point. It’s a tree we pick over and over again for 2-3 weeks because they are ripening that different.

Thanks a lot.... :-) . A Very interesting and informative video ....!!!

Beauty of Bath is a difficult apple to manage. The victorians put straw under the trees to cushion the falling apples and reduce bruising.

hey brendan ,i had a nice couple in my shop the other day from your area,had a good talk about the bramley .and how there daughter who lives here now can't find one in our stores any where.people love there apples.

I have a Discovery tree and find them a lovely apple, although sometimes it can be a little too early, before the bees are ready, it gave its best ever crop this year

HI stephen, I have just tasted my first Beauty of Bath, only has 4 apples on the tree & the first one dropped in the wind, looked perfectly coloured, but tasted awful. However the next apple to drop was 2 weeks later, it had a fabulous flavour. I am in Tasmania so maybe our long dry summers are better suited to it. Looking forward to next years crop to see how they are. By the way I have a small backyard orchard, 40 trees, & have found your video tutorials very helpful & informative.

Thanks for the interesting videos. Any experience with Gladstone?

I got my first ~25 William's Pride apples this year (3rd leaf tree). I started picking the first week of August, at which point, they were hard/crunchy, with 11-12 brix. I thought it was pretty good, but some of the people I shared with felt they were too sour. I picked the last one on 8/27 (14 brix), which was much more warmly received. It was still crisp, but much more tender and had watercore. These apples size up very well, with the largest being around 3.5"x3.25".

williams pride,seems to be a good early apple,worth looking into. I am going to try grafting it in the spring.cheers

Stephen, you can verify the pedigree of your Beauty of Bath so your description is obviously correct, but what I was told was, and believed to be Beauty of Bath was not this apple. I went to a village school in the New Forest there were 12 trees in the schoolhouse garden, 1 of which we were told was Beauty, I knew this tree from 1955 - 1962. They were early, a heavy cropper and different to any other apples. They were flat very red with yellow, wooly but juicy waxy skin and red tinged flesh

Here in Oregon Gravensteins have been in for a couple of weeks now and they're very nice early apples.

Stephen, here in Western Oregon our slim ate is similar to yours and they ripen the middle of August. Not super early but well before most. I have a red apple, name unknown unfortunately, that ripens the second week of July with good texture and flavor. Like all early apples though its only good for a brief period.

Because of the limited characters available to reply I had to edit some text out of my last reply. What I was trying to say was that perhaps what we were all led to believe was B of B was in fact some other similar variety. I drove 20 miles on Sunday to see if the apple trees were still at the old school, now the village hall, unfortunately no apple trees and not even any signs that they were ever there. What I left out of my description was that they were quite aromatic, acidic but not sour

Thank you so much. I wanted to do it without having to get the concentrate thing.

Great video, I was looking at grafting a beauty of bath this year from a friends orchard, but I might not bother now! I'm going to try to seek out the Devonshire quarrinton so I can graft one this spring to add to my collection. I've got 54 varieties so far so looking for different ones to add to the collection. Have you heard of Wagener and if so do you know anyone with the tree?I've read its meant to keep to July in an old book I've got (and you recommended to me!)

we have a very similar story with the yellow transparent here.not a great apple keeps for 5 days but well loved by old timers. cheers

Hi my friend I’m up in glasgow and was wondering where to buy beauty of bath for juicing because it’s early to get of the tree. If possible on dwarf root stocks Space it limited. Thanks again Miss your videos and loved your book recommendations. I got them lol. Just trying to keep the varieties alive. And well 🌞❤️🌱thanks again 👍🏼

Hello Stephen. If you want to prevent wasps at your apples, just hang a white plastic bag filled with paper or anything to make it round, around your trees. Wasps are territorial and will not tolerate other wasps nesting near to them. The white bags look like another nest. If you discover a wasps nest, just wait until night and hang the bag nearby. They will abandon their own nest and be gone before you get out of bed.

I have grown Wagener before and it is certainly an apple of merit. A good dual purpose apple which cooks well and can be eaten raw with pleasure once properly ripe, much like James Grieve. A long keeper, I wouldn't say July. The only apple I have ever kept until July was Suntan. It was wrinkly and no longer crunchy but full of flavour and well worth eating.

I have a 45 year old Discovery Apple tree which is around 15 meters high and is rather wide at being about 8-10 meters wide. We generally find that the more rain that we have just before the 27th August which is generally the date we like to pick them on will make the apples a whole lot juicier. I don't know why you don't like Discovery apples because I have found that for the other types of apples that we can get fresh around us, the Discovery is generally more apple like tasting with it being sweet, juicy and dense or crunchy.

A couple old American apples that fit the bill are Grimes Golden (ancestor of Golden Delicious, but with better flavor) and Tolman Sweet (seems to grow and crop OK here in Washington State, where I live).

We believe these are Beauty of Bath. Of course there is such a thing as mislabelling, but they are a perfect fit for the description and image in The Apple Book by Rosie Saunders which we use for ID.

I like the organic Braeburn from Sainsburys, very juicy, crisp and sweet. I'd like to go to an apple fair to try a large selection.

This raises a fair point, an apple or pear variety should not be rejected on 1 tasting. All the Discovery apples I have tasted have been under ripe or soft, and I wasn't impressed by the flavour, but that doesn't mean it is a write off, even allowing for personal preferences. If I have the chance I will try one, but at this stage in my life its unlikely I will be planting any.

Gravenstein is on my list to acquire, but I thought it was a mid season apple, not early. I must check.

I have this apple tree growing out behind my house in the woods, the apples are pretty good and are resistant to scabbing, I've been tending to it since I first saw it

The only early that we've planted on the edge of Saddleworth (look up Saddleworth Orchard on Facebook) is Discovery...given the later frosts up here. We planted our orchard in 2012...

Hard to recommend any one apple, but the highest sugar levels we ever got was Egremont Russet. Sugar levels increase (through evaporation) with storage in ventilated boxes before pressing especially if warm and a good flow of air. If you are going to distil (which I have never done and cannot recommend) then you may as well start with apple juice concentrate and cane sugar plus turbo yeast. I wouldn't, but there is advice and instruction out there if you are going that way.

Thanks Adam I was thinking of doing Golden Delicious but an ancestor would be better.

On the topic of raising apples from a pip, how's your experiment to raise 50 or so new apple trees coming along?

Are home grown apples a lot better than store bought? I don't particularly like apples, but I'm wondering if you let them get really ripe on the tree if they're much better.

Here in America we have the Yellow June Apple, The Carolina Red June Apple, The Yellow Transparent all ripping in June.

I remember being able to get boxes of Bramleys here for pennies but you could hardly buy them now because most of the crop goes to England for cider, apparently it is a very good cider apple. Maybe Stephen will see this comment and have an opinion of Bramleys as cider apples.

We have a much colder clima here than you have (easily -20°C in winter), the root stock is a seedling. Both trees are standard size. If the apple is fallen the sheeps are taking it immediately. So we can only pick. Other summer varieties we grow here are: White Transparent and Astramel. Gravensteiner is an autumn apple to us. Hope this comment helps because I think the worth of a variety changes with the area you try to grow it.

I have herd people say that up to half of the apples could be Bramleys, and still make good cider but stephen would have much more experience with this than me. cheers

"not as ugly as some things", I wonder what they would be?

How does the Beauty of Bath do for Pies or Baking?

Can you recommend a high sugar apple. I am thinking of growing it to make hard cider then possibly distil so I want as much sugar to convert to alcohol as possible.

same here on the east coast adam. you have to watch them close .or poof there gone. I planted one, but only for history sake.there are better early apples out there. :)

Slowly. The drought killed some of the seedlings off but many are holding on. My plan is to graft as many as survive the winter on to a tree which I will sacrifice for the purpose. Results will take 3-5 years. If I get one worthy new variety from it I will be delighted, but I'll post updates whatever happens.

Try Discovery again, I can't think why you don't like it, maybe you've had over or under ripe ones, it has slightly pink flesh, its crunchy, sweet really red and smells more appley then any other apple I know. However because it's red the birds peck it, it won't store and it won't bear fruit on young trees.

It depends somewhat. Generally bought apples have been picked long before they are ripe to aid storage, then force ripened with ethene. So yes, in general home grown apples will be better. More importantly though if you grow you own you can choose the variety, rather than have the big retailer chose it for you. I recently had a bought golden delicious v. grown Devonshire Quarrenden taste test. There is simply no comparison whatsoever.

can you imagine a herd of horses passing through there lol

Too bad about beauty of bath, it's so beautiful, reminds me of a washed russet in Wisconsin.

One more old orchard gone....so sad. Acid is another way of saying sour, its difficult to describe a taste. We are confident these varieties are correctly named, but have in the past been sold apples that we proved later were wrongly labelled. Without naming names, small nurseries are perhaps less certain to be accurate than large ones.

Why did you that pruning to appels

Depends. In my opinion home grown apples CAN be much better than industry apples, but it all depe4nds of season, timing, variety and personal preference. Its a bit like comparing farmhouse cheddar with pasteurised factory cheese or accountancy driven X factor music like One Direction with Bob Dylan. Each will have their preference and thank God we have a choice. In as much as we do have a choice since the industry will always tend to dominate. The public wants what the public gets.

NB I have replied to several posts here with a different avatar, don't worry its just that I forgot to log out of my political channel. At yesterday's Winchester Farmer's market we offered people a tasting of Devonshire Quarrenden and Beauty of Bath and without any guidance they all said the same-BoB was too soft and sour and they preferred Devonshire Quarrenden. Don't plant Beauty of Bath unless you have tasted it and are sure you like it. In my opinion the legend far exceeds the performance

Our other early apples are Irish Peach, Miller's Seedling, Baker's Delicious, Worcester Pearmain and St Edmund's Pippin. Customers moan about non availability of early ripening varieties, but getting them to market in a saleable condition is problematic, I can see why the fruit industry doesn't want to know. Incidentally, there is quite a bit about apple growing and cider in my Kindle novel, 'Darwin's Adders: A Chronicle of Pagan England 2089' I dropped the price as its not selling.

Yes I am a Rambling Man but thankfully still married to the kind and good woman who has seen me get fat and ugly over the last 37 years.

Bramley is a good acidic cooking apple and great for sauce, but is no good for cider unless your cider is short of acid, in which case a proportion is good. Bramley lacks any tannin and is very weak in aromatic flavour compounds. Pure Bramley cider is undrinkable. This is not just my opinion but that of a majority of people on the cider discussions groups I have participated in. Its a good apple, worth preserving and growing but overrated. another fault is it grows too big for small gardens

Why kill wasps on social media? Not the thing to do. 👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎

You don't mean julia is uglier?

You are brambling again.