North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Dennis Norton" <dmnorton@royaloakfarmorchard.com>]

Honeycrisp have actually been around for about 10 years now, but have only reached popularity in the past 3 to 4 years in northern Illinois.  Here at Royal Oak Farm we have been taking our Red Delicious and replacing with Honeycrips and have over 1,000 trees that are at 3rd and 4th leaf.  We have never been able to meet the demand for them and don't charge as much as most places.  This past season, other growers were asking around $35 - $37 per bushel wholesale.  I had customers tell me they paid as high as $120 per bushel retail!  I can't justify that kind of price for a Honeycrisp.  Our Jonagored (Stark Bros. Jonagold) and our Senshu (Toko & Fuji cultivar) have been blind taste tested with honeycrisp and folks could not tell which one was honeycrisp!  We have been charging around $75 per bushel for our honeycrisp and will probably stay in that range this 2007 season.  This coming spring we have another 500 honeycrisp planned for planting.  We'll keep planting more trees to keep up with demand instead of raising prices to a ridicules level!

 

Dennis Norton
Royal Oak Farm Orchard
http://www.royaloakfarmorchard.com
http://www.theorchardkeeper.blogspot.com

----- Original Message -----

From: Richard MURPHY

To: nafex

Sent: Monday, January 01, 2007 10:56 AM

Subject: [NAFEX] Honeycrisp

Hello Doreen, Spidra, Bob, and everyone.

 

Thanks for the callback. I will try a couple Pixies, in spite of the zone 5 rating they usually get; sometimes this is conservative....it happens

 

Honeycrisp also stopped me in my tracks at the store, Spidra. Beautiful ! I agree 100%. Who knows where they were from?

They were shockers. Then, on a couple of occasions, I've seen a couple of bins of what I thought were big ugly-duckling Mac culls, that turned out to be Honeycrisps. Really strange. It may have to do with trace minerals in the soil, or something like that according to a Cornell paper I was reading. I will be watching the growers in my area to learn more about this. It might turn out to be an easy fix. They are one of the nicest tasting / pleasing to eat apples I've ever had, and there is a bag of them in my fridge....even at the higher price.

 

RM