Apples

Epicenter Orchard

Saturday, September 26.

We’re definitely moving on in the season. I had my first Allen’s Everlasting a coulple days ago. So good, and it’s still only September. They will be in the tasting box this week, but won’t be available in quantities for a couple weeks. Hudson’s Golden Gem, with its rich vanilla, pear-like flavor and Karmijn de Sonnaville, with its sharp but syrupy, citrus tang are both holding on, but it’s nearing the end for them.  Both are still great, but the trees are getting empty. Again this week we’ll have the Stardust and Suntan. These apples are superstars. Stardust has the perfect snappy texture, high, sweet tart flavor, and incredible good looks. Suntan is flattened and ugly, but tastes like a Cox’s Orange on steroids. Impossibly high sugar, aromatics and acid. The farthest thing there is from a cosmic crisp. King David is present and accounted for, rich and cidery. Ruby Tuesday is out in such force, it should last the whole day. Such a unique and delicious pink-fleshed apple, neither acidic nor boring, It’s bubblegum/berry flavor will charm even the most stubborn apple phobe. Rubaiyat is a deep pink-fleshed fruit that is sharp and bright earlier in the season, perfect for featuring in a pie, but now its sugar is starting to accumulate, which makes for a bold and delicious eating experience. Pineapple Crunch will make a showing, and and Brushy Mountain Limbertwig is coming into its prime. Rich and interesting, vanilla and slight citrus, with a super crisp texture, this is the gateway apple to venture from supermarket to Epicenter.  We have a lot of Macouns again this week, for people with fond memories of growing up picking apples in the fall on the East coast. Belle de Boskoops are the ultimate baking apple, and we will have a good supply. Great for fresh eating also, for the apple adventurers out there.

Beyond apples, we’ll have a tote of sweet, smooth and silky Warren pears. 

We will also have a couple totes of our favorite pear, the Highland, This is a Comice x Bartlet cross from Cornell university. Pedigree only counts for so much, as the younger generation is never really a sure thing. This pear will not disappoint. Dense yet melting flesh, sweet and syrupy, with a touch of lemony zing and a hint of astringency to make it more of an adult taste than the simply sweet and fragrant Warrens.

Our dry-farmed heirlom tomatoes will be making a token appearance. Solar Flare, Cherokee Purple, Prudence purple, Porkchop, Black Krim, Amana Orange, Dr. Wychees, Thesaloniki, Chocolate Vintage; hard to keep them straight! It’s definitely okay to just grab the colors you like.

Avocados for this week will be the incomparable Bird Avenue, and the lovely Lamb Hass.

We’ll have a smattering of other things, like Feijoas, Manzano peppers, Citrus.

We will also have tasting boxes: 12 exceptional apples, with history and description key, for $25

 

Apple Tasting Box  September 26, 2026

1. Leicester.  Watsonville, CA, 2007.  A Grenadine x Cox’s Orange Pippin Cross, this pretty, productive apple is easy to grow, with a sweet, anise-tinged, aromatic flavor.

           2. Pomme Gris. Europe, 1600s.  Also known as French Russet, French or Swiss settlers brought it with them to North America where it was planted in Canada’s St. Lawrence Valley.  Jefferson grew it at Monticello.  Its rich complex flavor makes it an apple for the connoisseur.

           3. Spitzenberg. Esopus, NY, 1700s  This sweet-sharp, complexly flavored apple is said to have been Thomas Jefferson’s favorite apple based on the large number of this variety planted at Monticello (36!). Unexcelled in quality, this large bright red apple has flesh tinged yellow, and is firm, aromatic, and complex in flavor; a perfect balance of lively acidity and sweetness’.  A.J. Downing, America’s foremost nineteenth-century pomologist, described ‘Esopus Spitzenburg’ as “a handsome, truly delicious apple…unsurpassed as a dessert fruit…considered the first of apples.” Today, apple connoisseurs still consider this variety among the finest ever known.  Besides being great out of hand, it’s the apple around which the Waldorf salad was devised, and boasts enough acid to bake up rich, flavorful and intact, making it a first choice for pies and tarts.

4. Allington Pippin. England, before1884. Nurseryman Thomas Laxton’s cross of King of Pippins x Cox’s Orange Pippin. Widely planted in early 1900s England, but their season wasn’t long enough to fully ripen it most years. Here it attains an intense fruity, aromatic flavor. 

5. Katherine. 1940s, Humboldt County, CA. Clean, crisp, straight forward good flavor makes this one of Albert Etter’s best varieties. Named after his mail-order bride to whom he was married until his death in 1950.

6. Stardust.  Aromas, CA, 2008. Chance seedling found in an abandoned orchard. Appears to be a McIntosh seedling, because of its color, surface bloom, and fruity flavor. Yellow Bellflower may be a parent as well, because of its surface spotting, and puckered bottom.  Fine high flavor, stores well.

7. King David.  Arkansas, 1893. The dark red,  nearly maroon skin of this classic southern apple hides highly aromatic, spicy flesh with plenty of sprightly acidity. The tree was discovered growing in a hedgerow in Washington County, Arkansas and is believed to be a seedling of the Jonathon. It certainly has the juicy sweetness of its parent, which lends itself well to cider.  Cooked, the King David has a rich yellow color and vibrant flavor.  King David is memorable for dessert, pie and sauce making.

8. Rubaiyat. Humboldt County, CA, 1940s. An Albert Etter variety recovered from an abandoned orchard, rescued from a branch of a dying tree.  Firm fleshed, can achieve a deep red color, high sugar late in the season. Strong and rich on the palate, both color and flavor shine when cooked.

9. Solar Flair.  Watsonville, 2023. Wickson Crab, the famously intense Albert Etter creation, is a grandparent to this brightly colored little apple. That same high-decibel flavor graces this firm-fleshed, flattened little gem. Productive and easy to grow.

10. Ruby Tuesday. Watsonville, 2007.  Hauer Pippin crossed with Rubaiyat, this gorgeous apple glows pink through its thin yellow skin, and dazzles at first bite. Crisp red flesh all the way to the core, its high sugar and zingy berry flavor dance around on your tongue. Bred by Epicenter.

11. Very Impressive Pink (V.I.P.). Watsonville, 2011. Late ripening, deeply colored, strongly flavored pink-fleshed apple bred from a cross of Allen’s Everlasting and Grenadine. This one bakes nicely, as its bright color and ample acid stand out in any recipe. Its 18 brix sugar reading makes it a memorable eating apple as well.

12. Macoun. New York, 1923.  Has the cidery crispness of the New England favorite, McIntosh, but produces higher quality fruit than its parent in SC County. A flavorful eating apple, the Macoun is a cross between McIntosh and Jersey Black.  Pronounced “Ma – Cown”.

 

https://santacruzfarmersmarket.org/markets/westside/

 

 

About our operation

Our orchard in Larkin Valley was planted in 2005, as an outgrowth of a runaway hobby/obsession with apples that hasn’t quite run its course. The land was a wet meadow-turned orchard in the 1920s, became a horse pasture in the 60s, reverting to wet meadow in the late 80s. It lies along the bottom of a narrow north-south running valley, bordered on both sides by walls of redwood and oak. Up watershed a rangy tangle of willows divides it from hundreds of acres of rolling wild land.

 Ours is a little one-and-a-half acre plot on the edge of a huge block of fairly pristine native habitat that supports a lot of wildlife. We see cougars, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, deer, wild turkeys, eagles, cooper’s hawks, red tailed and red-shouldered hawks, 3 kinds of owl, and lots of gophers. We can trap the gophers, and fence out the deer, but the coyotes are smart. They help with the gophers, but love pears a little too much. A battery of perches and boxes turn the bluebirds, swallows, chickadees and raptors into charismatic farm laborers.

Deep distrust of synthetic chemicals leads me to reject them on my farm and elsewhere in my life, but we do use OMRI listed pheromone ties against codling moth. No synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, no sulphur, copper, neem, or dormant oil, as all these agents kill unintended, innocent organisms. We spray calcium and manganese to help with calcium deficiency in some varieties,  use mountains of composted tree chips to conserve water and suppress weeds, and apply occasionally some composted animal manure for fertility. We don’t plow or disc between our rows, using instead a walk-behind high-weed mower to maintain a year-round mixed grass/weed/flower cover instead. What this means is we spend a lot of time crawling our rows, hand weeding to keep the bindweed from swallowing our trees.

Getting down to the apples, we try to grow European style, high flavor types that nobody’s ever heard of unless maybe they happen to be an apple geek, from Europe, or had occasion to haunt their farmers markets. These differ from the commodity varieties like Gala, Fuji, Cosmic Crisp, and could never be confused with a sweetened jicama. They’re busting  with acidity, aromatics, even a little astringency to complement their high sugar, making for an intense, complex, high-impact eating experience. 

An example of what I mean is the Karmijn de Sonnaville apple from the Netherlands. This is an apple so distinctive in flavor, that it destroys past concepts of what an apple is supposed to taste like.  Sugar, acidity, aromatic components in such opulence, it illuminates the fundamental short-coming of conventional apple varieties. Big flavor is composed of acid, aromatics, astringency, even some bitter elements (think cherries). These compliment the sugar, filling-out, complicating, and defining the apple’s flavor so it’s more than the watery sweet crunch that we have grown so familiar with in commercial apples.

The reason store bought apples all seem to share that same boring taste profile is functional.  When you pick an apple at full ripeness, it doesn’t store for long periods without deteriorating and becoming mealy, bland and mushy. So if an apple must store in good shape for a year to be considered marketable (as the industry currently demands) then it must be picked  young. That’s not something you can pull off with a full-flavored apple. A young heirloom type will have low sugars, high tannins and acid, and underdeveloped aromatics. If there are bitter elements in there that high sugars would mask or turn into an asset, they will be up front and objectionable. In short, a richly flavored apple harvested for maximum storage potential will fall far short of its flavor potential, and nobody would want to eat it.

A modern commercial variety will taste about like itself if picked young, just a little less sweet. So in the search for new apple varieties (think CosmiCrisp, EverCrisp), there is a premium placed on long storing, mild flavored, early coloring, high-sugar types that can be picked and eaten at that crucial early stage of maturity, without sacrificing much flavor potential (because that potential is low to begin with), but hold their texture for twelve months in cold storage, so they can retain their place in the grocer’s displays.

The industry’s emphasis on crispness and sweetness are the only two cards they have to play with in their deck. This narrow focus comes at the direct expense of flavor. We believe there is a place for this kind of indestructible apple, especially having grown up in the age of the mushy, bland and ubiquitous Red Delicious apple.  That era served as a powerful training ground, establishing an almost universal hatred for stale storage apples.  Cosmic Crisp hasn’t much flavor, but it can never be called mushy, and people are happy about that.

Our strategy for avoiding the musty, end-stage storage apple is the opposite. We choose powerfully flavored apples, pick them ripe, at near their peak flavor, and sell them directly to the public while they are crisp, juicy and fresh. We’ve seen how our varieties destroy the commercial types in side-by-side comparisons. Our annual apple tasting event at Wilder Ranch pits 75+varieties against each other, and rarely does a commercial type place within the top twenty. 

This approach has led us to explore ever more widely for varieties that people not only like, but react passionately to. Expect to encounter apples you will never see anywhere else. Expect them to pop up in their peak season and disappear from our stand when that time has passed.

We have grown around 300 different varieties of apples over the past 35 years, but we distill-down our market selection to perhaps 30 of our personal favorites. Beyond that, we have been breeding apples for flavor since 2005. Our Royal Blush, Ruby Tuesday, Code Pink, VIP, Hauer’s Gold, Crabby Lady, Pineapple Candy and Pineapple Crunch varieties are fixtures at our stand, redefining the standards of apple flavor with their high sugar and wild mix of berry/pineapple/grape/rose notes.

We at Epicenter are thrilled to be able to play with a full deck, and explore the entire range of apple flavor-potential, unrestrained by mass marketing limitations.

Not everyone shares our preferences. Some people are so used to supermarket apples, they feel disoriented, affronted by bold flavors. Luckily for them, there are many places to buy normal type apples. After 25 years of running public apple tastings, we’ve seen that there is a solid segment of the population who responds to high-flavored apples, and we feel relieved and delighted to target those who share our sensibilities. It’s a resonant experience to provide the kind of fruit we love directly to the people who are thirsting for it. Spend a minute in our stand and you’ll feel it. We hope to continue to attract an ever-growing and enthusiastic following of avid apple-lovers who will further enable our behavior.

Since farming is all about enormous amounts of sometimes boring, often repetitive, mostly difficult and obscurely technical labor, if we didn’t love the process of discovering and producing great fruit, and weren’t thrilled to see our customers light-up over it, all that bother would feel a little bit stupid.