The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Summer Rambo apples?

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.

JammingEven 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!)

Our EZ Miser has been jumping off the shelves because it makes clean water for your chickens even easier.


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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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They look like Grimes Golden
Comment by Anonymous Tue Aug 28 09:38:22 2018





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