CHERRY CRUSH

SKILLCULT APPLE BREEDING PROJECT

This page is for archiving information about my seedling apple Cherry Crush.

Cherry crush was first fruited in 2021. It is a cross between Grenadine and Cherry Cox. Grenadine being a very pink fleshed apple with incredible fruit punch flavor and Cherry Cox, a sport of Cox’s Orange Pippin, with a cherry flavor. This is an important apple to me in that it shows that the cherry flavor of Cherry Cox is definitely transferable to offspring. This development is so encouraging, that I’m using Cherry Cox even more in breeding now. That said, none of the other Cherry Cox crosses I’ve made do not taste of cherries.

The original seedling was almost culled out. I had a small block of trees of which I lost track of the parents, except that I knew one parent was Grenadine. I kept a few of them with the reddest bark and left this one growing in place. Good thing I didn’t cull this one! It is in a garden bed, so I kept looping the shoots around and twisting them together into hoops, so it is now a very weird looking tree.

Cherry crush is a tasty, pretty apple with nice flesh texture. It is all around pleasant eating. The flesh is a light pink in some cases and mottled in others. The flesh color is never dark and may not even develop in some climates, or in some years. While the apple is overall a nice dessert apple, the distinguishing characteristic is definitely the subtle cherry flavor. It does not have as much cherry flavor as it’s parent Cherry Cox, nor is it as complexly flavored, but in other ways it is an improvement on that apple. Cherry Crush has better flesh texture and is larger. It has a very nice sugar to acid balance. It also inhereted the some of Cox’s skin coloration, with wide paintbrush-like red streaks. The bottom line is that as grown here, I would rather eat Cherry Crush than Cherry Cox. Cox’s Orange pippin does not do very well here though and Cherry Cox has always been more about the neat cherry flavor than an overall balanced eating experience. A friend who fruited i in the Northwest also agreed with this assessment.

The growth habit of this tree seems to be quite vigorous and I have heard as much from others who grafted it. It gets a lot of burr knot, which may indicate that it will root easily from cuttings. Otherwise burr not is not desirable, but usually we can live with it.

I’m quite excited about this apple and have already sent out a couple hundred scions. The tree is growing on it’s own roots and seems pretty vigorous. I can’t say much about it’s growth habits, disease and so on at this time. I know I look forward to eating a lot of them and feeding them to a few other people. I have already started to use it in breeding. I crossed it back to cherry cox and crossed cherry cox onto it. I also crossed the pollen of Sweet 16, another cherry flavored apple, onto Cherry Crush along with many others. I hope this apple does as well or better in other places as it does here. Great name, great sugar/acid balance, pretty, good sized, nice texture, intriguing unusual flavor, this one’s a winner and may have real staying power. We shall see.

Cherry Crush is a short season dessert apple. Ripening seems to be late September to Early October here. Thanks to its momma Grenadine, its texture goes downhill shortly after ripening, so no one will be keeping this apple around for long. That is okay, we can enjoy it when it is in season and move on to the next apples.

UPDATE 2023: In it’s season, cherry crush was my favorite apple in 2023. The cherry flavor was distinct, if variable and the overall flavor otherwise delicious and somewhat complex, that deriving from its Cox heritage. I think this apple will be very popular with many people wherever it grows well. I have a feeling it will actually do better in some climates than it does here in our dry heat. Graft it now, thank me later :)

As with all my varieties, scion wood for grafting is available in the winter for a short time. Subscribe to my blog to find out when scions drop. As of 2025, grafted trees are available through a partnership with Cummin’s Nursery as well.