Honeycrisp apples

I am feeling super spoiled and lucky at the moment! I live in West MI and we have tons of orchards here. Honeycrisps are still quite pricey BUT one of the orchards delivered a shipping crate of Honeycrisp "seconds" (the ones with less than perfect looking skin that they can't sell to the stores) to the hardware store where my son works. I was able to get 8 lbs. for $2.50!!!!! I'm hoping they have some left yet next week when he works again. We've gone through about 12 lbs of apples so far this weekend! (I dehydrates some for apple chips, make crisp, and then we just eat the rest.)

Hey, we're neighbors :bigsmile: Love apple season in our area! I made a great apple raspberry crisp earlier this week, using gala apples from the orchard across the street from us and then some of the $1 raspberries that Meijer had last week

I just got done teaching a unit on apples! Each day we tried a new type of apple. My favorite has always been the gala...... until I tried the honeycrisp! OMG. It is to die for!

Oh, I'm glad I found an apple expert! Whatever happened to the luscious, crisp Red Delicious? They are awful now! Someone told me that they'd messed with them genetically to get a bright red skin and it ruined the taste and texture...I don't know what happened, but what I've tasted in the last couple of years is nothing like what they were when I was a grasshopper. Do you know the story?

Apples are very sensitive to cultivation methods. Put a different compost on the ground and they will taste different. This is actually a fairly recently discovered phenomenon. One place flew farmers from Japan to compare notes because theirs still tasted the way they used to. It'll take a while though to get the trees producing apples the way they were before.

It has nothing to do with "messing with them genetically". Apples are genetic chimeras, and are basically impossible to breed via traditional methods.