‘Arkansas Black’

Our orchard is 4 years old now and the last fruit have been picked for the season.  We started out with thirty-five or so heirloom varieties of apple, peach and cherry.  Today we have forty-eight trees adding pear-apple, crabapple and plum to the mix.   A couple of varieties from the original planting simply didn’t pass muster and have been replaced with the farm favorite apple, ‘Arkansas Black’.

‘Arkansas Black’, as its name suggests, is a dark red apple with slight flecks of gold.  Ripening in late October through November it is an extremely hard apple.  The flesh is a pale yellow and perfect for crisp bites fresh from the tree, baking, or apple sauce.   Reported to be an excellent storage apple, we hope to have apples throughout the winter season.

This season’s yield was our largest yet with approximately 150 predominately softball sized apples.  The largest and most beautiful have been shared with family and the rest will be consumed a few at a time while those with blemishes will be used to make a  nice batch of applesauce.

 

 

This entry was written by Stephanie Tittle, posted on October 27, 2012 at 4:12 pm, filed under Orchard. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.