Chuck Wendig at Terrible Minds is doing lots of apple reviews right now — meaning no, really, reviews of apples. Here’s his review of Esopus Spitzenburg.

BIG CRONCH, then crazy juice damming the mouth. And no delay on flavor — the flavor is a wave crashing hard against the seawall of your tongue. This is a big-flavored apple. Unfuckwithable. Unquestioning sweetness lands at the same time as the flash-bang of tartness. Dense flesh. Nice skin. (This is also how I advertise myself on the dating apps. Dense flesh. Nice skin. Hey ladies. And by dating apps, I mean iNaturalist.) This is also… a pretty appley-apple. There are some complex flavors — a bit of strawberry and guava, and lavender that I found present when I ate the skin, not present when I didn’t. I’ve read reports from folks where this was a mushy, sloppy apple — even mealy. But mine was toothsome, almost to the point of being chewy. That and a lingering tobacco aftertaste are the only things from having me rate this higher and maybe even ending up the best apple of the batch so far.

I tried an Esopus once and I got a mushy one, so this is definitely a try at your own risk apple.

Here’s his review of Ruby Mac, which I’ve never tried.

The color of the Ruby Mac — and many of the McIntoshes I’ve eaten — is this kind of muddy sangria red color that I really love. The shape and color of it often remind me less of an apple and more of an heirloom tomato like a Cherokee Purple or a Tommy Parmesan or a River-Drowned Winelump and okay only one of those is real I didn’t feel like Googling a bunch of tomato variants, I already have too much apple information inside my head to be healthy and sane.

Lots of others.

My favorite apple this year is Honeycrisp, by which I mean the ones I picked off my tree. I basically don’t buy apples, like, ever, because I know that in a good year I will get a surfeit of apples coming off my trees and in a bad year the squirrels get them all and I’m too mad to even want to look at apples. Anyway, Honeycrisp are too sweet for me a few weeks after they’ve been picked, but they’re great just off the tree.

Those are an early-season apple. Here are the ones I just picked yesterday:

This is an apple that is not that great, in SOME ways. It’s called Liberty, meaning it’s free of various diseases that plague apples, and yes, fine, it’s highly resistant to lots of things AND it does not get damaged by bugs a lot. I mean, a few apples are damaged, but very few, comparatively. The skin is really tough, which I suspect explains a lot of its resistance to this and that. The flavor is okay. As a cooking apple, it’s just fine. Holds its texture and shape. It bears every other year, more or less. It’s the least good of the apples I grow — Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Fuji, Liberty, Goldrush, and and apple called Hokuto that is better some years than others and bears about every third year, so not impressive overall.

However, Liberty is one of the most practical of the apples I grow, because it is pretty resistant to everything and stores very well. The most practical apple, which is also just a better apple, is Pink Lady. It bears every single year — it does have to be thinned hard because it’s way too enthusiastic — it is resistant to pests, it stores VERY well, and it’s far better after a month in storage, which is fantastic compared to the apples that are fine for a week or too and then overly sweet. I mean Fuji and Honeycrisp.

The varieties I would actually recommend for normal people who just want to grow a few apples in Missouri include Pink Lady, Liberty, and Goldrush, and of the three, Pink Lady is by far the most dependable.

You’re going to need a squirrel-proof fence or you will not get any apples. An electric wire along the top of the fence does the trick for me. At the moment a specific young opossum has figured out how to get over the wire and into the orchard, I believe. He has gradually eaten most of the remaining Fujis. I mean, they’re gradually disappearing, and it’s not squirrels, so I think it’s this opossum. I could shoot him at any time because the dogs tree him on top of the fence nearly every evening, but he’s not doing that much damage, so I am just letting him have the Fujis. The Pink Lady are apparently too tart for him as long as Fujis are an alternative.

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