When I say crab apple, a lot of people will think of something for cooking at most, or more likely for the birds to eat. Well, I’m sure the birds will love my new crab apple, but there is nothing crabby about it. In fact, Cherub is an exceedingly polite dessert apple. Lets dig in to the specifics.
Wickson is the seed parent and the red fleshed Rubaiyat is the pollen parent. Both parents were brought into the world by visionary plant breeder Albert Etter in the first half of the 20th century. The pollination was made in spring of 2013. The seeds were planted in the winter and grown out for the summer of 2014 into saplings. In spring 2015, they were grafted onto dwarfing rootstocks and planted out to await fruiting in the trial rows.
2015 seedlings grafted to dwarfing stocks and planted in the trial rows to await fruiting..
The first and only of those 2013 seedlings to produce fruit in 2018, was Cherub. So right off, it gets points for being precocious. In fact, Precocious was one of the 3 run off names that I had the good folks that support me on Patreon choose from. It is also worth noting that it has fruited the two years since as well, so it is very likely going to get points for regular bearing.
Cherub, small, chubby and irregular
The apple is small, though not all that small for a crab. The skin, when it colors up in the sunlight is like it’s parents, striped with light to dark reds, layered over yellows. When it reddens up well, it is quite attractive hanging on the tree. The outline is lumpy and irregular, and the somewhat chubby appearance is one of the reasons that I hit on the name Cherub. The cherubs of the old classic paintings, and of modern folk art, are typically chubby and pink.
The flesh color varies from somewhat mottled pink and white, to dark pink all the way through. This flesh coloration will vary from season to season and fruit to fruit.
A cut Cherub in a collection of other seedlings from my breeding project. The flesh color seems to vary a lot, but that is fairly typical of red fleshed apples.
Culturally, it appears to be a small tree. It is hard to tell for sure with only a single parent tree, but so far, it is rangy and small. The tree got what appeared to be fireblight on the trunk early in it’s life, with black running sap from sores in the bark. It has survived without intervention though, continuing to grow and fruit. I’m not sure it is fireblight, but I suspect it is. My notes seem to indicate that scab susceptibility is light to medium.
The season for this apple is probably long, with more flavor developing later on. I have picked it as early as mid October and as late as December. it’s too early yet to say when is best and that will vary from climate to climate anyway.
It has flavors from both of it’s parents, but not always in great abundance. It has some mixed fruit and berry flavors from Rubaiyat. It also has a small, but significant, measure of the rich, deep, malty goodness of Wickson. Wickson lends richness and depth and rubaiyat lends higher fruit notes. The two together make a slightly odd, but compelling and interesting palette of flavors.
Sugar is through the roof. It was the third highest reading of the year in 2019 at 24%. It is all the sweeter tasting because it is also low in acid. It can be sweet to the point of being cloying due to this combination of low acid and high sugar. It should be good for processing into cider jelly, cider syrup, juice, hard cider and apple butter, at least when paring is not required.
Out of the crab apples I’ve been able to grow and taste, this is probably the third best, with the other two being Wickson and Chestnut Crab. But it’s hard to really rank them, because they are all quite a bit different. The fourth would be Trailman. There are still a lot of crab apples I haven’t tasted, but I would guess that if one were to spend a few years ferreting out and growing the very best small apples with crab genes, I’d be surprised if it did not rank in the top dozen, and more likely the top half dozen. I think crab apples as good as cherub, and better, are coming in the near future, either from my orchards or other’s. For now, this apple can compete in the pool. It also shows what is possible by injecting new flavors into our crabs.
Cherub was an inspired cross of two parents with exceptional traits of one kind and another. As is often the case, it shows obvious traits of both parents, extreme sugar and malty richness from Wickson and red flesh, fruity/berry flavors and coloration from Rubaiyat. I have been somewhat lukewarm on this apple actually, because, with all it’s exceptionally good characteristics, I tend to feel that something is missing in the eating of it. It may very well be as simple as the low acid, which coupled with exceptional sweetness can make it seem a bit cloying at times. Or maybe it’s that one or other of the flavors is just not quite up front enough. Then one day I realized that I’ve been enthusiastically breeding with it already, crossing it onto various other apples, and that it competes with the best crabs I’ve eaten, those that inspired me to breed with crabs in the first place! This led to an epiphany that I am indeed a picky little bitch and totally spoiled! The apples I’m hoping to breed I can already taste in my mind, and they are lofty imaginings. Those may come to fruition in the future, but it is definitely time to name this little nugget of sweet goodness and send her off into the big world to multiply and perhaps produce some delicious and hopefully superior offspring in someones orchard.
So here it is, the aptly named Cherub; a fruit of ridiculous Sweetness, chubby, pink fleshed and deliciously different. If it turns out to be as good as I think it is, I think it’s worth pausing a second to consider the ramifications of producing such a promising crab apple in a small population of seedlings. What then is to come in the future? I will restrain myself from going off on a tangent about the potential there is in breeding with crabs, both for home growers and the public market. I’ve already gone there before and will at some point make the point even more emphatically.
Scions will be available this year, but in very limited quantities since I only have a few from the original tree. They will likely be sold in some kind of auction to raise money for my breeding and orchard projects.
