Summer Rambo apples?
I
turned most of the apples Kayla gave me into pectin juice for
jam, but a few looked more ripe and ready for a taste
test. I was surprised by the sweet-tart, explosive flavor of
the apples and asked Kayla what kind they were. She replied
that the tree was old and no one knew what it had been.
Even with the variety unknown, I could
propagate the tree by grafting
a twig onto one of our current apple trees or onto rootstock, but
I had a hunch I could identify the fruit. Last summer,
Bradley sang the praises of Summer Rambo, which is reputed to
ripen at this time of year and which seems to be a local
favorite. Could the unknown apple be Summer Rambo?
Kayla independently
came to the same conclusion while on her first-anniversary trip to
North Carolina. She and her husband stopped at a fruit stand
along the way and saw some apples she thought looked just like her
own. The variety? Summer Rambo.
I installed a Summer
Rambo in my high-density
planting last fall, so in a year or two, I'll be able to
compare a homegrown Summer Rambo to Kayla's mystery fruits.
In the meantime, I thought I'd ask our readers --- if you grow
Summer Rambo, do the apples at the top of this post look familiar?
(The other photo is
Mark's cousin Ben helping me make jam out of some of the
apple-pectin juice. This second round worked like a
charm! We stopped cooking after 18 minutes when the
temperature hit 218 degrees, and the jam was lighter in color with
less of a cooked taste than last
time. I'm definitely getting the hang of cooked jams!)
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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