Seedling 82 - a new apple varietyOn a wet morning in November 2022, I was doing a final assessment of the remaining seedlings (rarely does fruit improve on the tree after this period). I found a few apples on seedling 82, an oblong conical yellow apple which I had scored as a 2 in October. They had developed new red streaks and looked like they hadn’t turned yet (become overripe) so it was worth another assessment.
This time Seedling 82 blew my mind! It was near perfection! How could an apple improve so late in the season? Seedlings 73 and 77 had been very good apples which I felt confident would please the majority of fellow apple lovers; I strongly felt 82 was going to be a huge favourite.
This led to a cocktail of excitement and anxiety: I wanted to try this apple again next November but in the meantime it was vital not to let this variety die before I could graft it, and as I felt this apple would be a huge success maybe it could actually have a monetary value? How would I go about naming and protecting the rights to the variety? I had looked into this after 73 and 77. I found a solution involving registering the genetic fingerprint of the variety and trademarking the names. With a few early successes under my belt I felt confident that maybe it was time to start thinking about releasing my new varieties by selling trees through our website.
2023 was much like the previous season: I had another 25% of new seedlings to trial and I was chip-budding about 600 “2021 seedlings” onto M9 rootstocks. I took the role of note-taking very seriously that autumn and discovered several additional 4s. I was again aware that many seedlings were performing differently to previous seasons and now felt that a consistently high score over several seasons was a truer mark of excellence.
Sadly, seedling 73 had an off season (I gave it a 3) the little tree had produced a glut of beautiful red apples but they were all somewhat lacking in flavour, which is not an uncommon issue. I was also beginning to reach out to a wider audience and was delighted to find a few other breeders on social media, many in America - a land that depended for many years on seedling apple culture.
I was keen to learn from others and share my findings, so I sent samples (within the UK) and received feedback. I learnt then that astonishingly up until that point I had been unaware of or had never acknowledged and accepted the vast differences of tastes and appreciation for apples. In general, the comments were positive as I had hoped, but there were no clear favourites… Why would there be? I was initially disheartened, but I recalled how often on our annual nursery open day, visitors would become enamoured by varieties that I had never found interesting. I was the apple expert constantly tasting apples every season but still I can’t control what or why another person likes to eat something. It is a good thing that we all enjoy different tastes, and it is a good thing that there are so many different tasting apples!
British-grown fruit trees