8/3 Today we picked the white apples. They have skins the color of old yellowed bones, and translucent flesh so that when you slice them open you can see the seeds through the flesh. Bone-and-glass apples, parchment apples, ghost apples.
They bruise easily, a purplish brown rather too similar to a bruise on human skin. If you pick one up, there’s a good chance the shapes of your fingertips will be marked on it the next day. I want to try writing words on them by pressing on them with a pencil eraser sometime.
They smell very faintly of perfume, maybe roses. They do not smell like apples. Apple maggots never infest them (probably because their growing time is too short to support the apple
maggot fly life cycle. It’ll be another month or two before the
rest of our apples are ripe).They’re lovely. They are also disgusting. Mealy and soft, with no flavor whatsoever. They’re not sweet. They’re not even sour. It’s like a mouth full of wet cotton ball. I’m pretty sure I spit it out the first time I tried one.
I hope you all understand how weird this is: even the goats are reluctant to eat them. They’ll eat an apple or two, but then they lose interest (except in keeping the sheep from eating any, of course).
I have no idea why a previous resident planted the ghost-apple tree. If they have any flavor at all, only the restless dead can taste it.
I have to say, I’ve seen, researched, and planted a lot of apples in my time, but I have never seen anything like this.
My best guess is that your tree is a chance seedling with a genetic mutation, given that it is both leucistic/albinoid and early-ripening. I’d hazard a guess it’s also polyploid.
lazyevaluationranch: If you’re able to save some scion wood next Autumn, I’d be very interested in grafting a branch or two of this to one of my trees: not for the utility of it, so much as for the novelty and breeding possibilities.
A little added info: It could be a variety of Potter County White Transparent. From the heritage apple site:
White Transparent, Ghost or Spirit Apple, or Apples of Saint Peter. The Russian Petrovka group are all thin-skinned pale apples that ripen near the feast of Saint Peter, and are offered to Widows and orphans (first fruits) or to the graves of the recent dead of the winter, representing God’s Mercy after trial. Apple associated with Baba Yaga, and with foretelling the past or the future. This Transparent is from Coudersport, Pennsylvania, likely brought as seed with Russian immigrants.
I hate this apple tree so much, and its fandom even more.
I’m so, so, so happy your haunted ghost apple tree of the dead has a fandom.
An international fandom, interested in spreading it’s probably-evil mysteries to the world, and apparently inflicting it’s wet-cotton-ball qualities on the mouths of poor starving widows and orphans who probably didn’t deserve it.
You don’t even know. I think we have more than 100 asks from people who want us to give them seeds (foolish!) or cuttings (demanding!) Some winter, we’re going to take like 10 cuttings and auction them off to these people. If the number of unsolicited offers is any indication of what it’d be like on the open market, we’d be able to retire.
(I love anyone who follows @lazyevaluationranch. Some of the twists and turns I’ve seen the posts about the ghost apples take, though, in the wilds of aesthetic Tumblr. Ugh.)
LOL! I hadn’t even thought of that wrinkle. Do I dare ask what they call it? Soft crap apple aesthetic?
(I don’t actually understand the whole adding ‘soft’ in front of these things, honestly. I kind of see it as a cross between ‘blurry’ and ‘noncommittal’, which I don’t think is intended).
I think you should do that auction. You could then support the goats in the manner to which they no doubt desire to become accustomed.
