ID My Apple Tree No.1

None of them quite look like a Bramley, which must comprise about 99% of the cookers grown in Britain. Bramley tends to have a rather deep flower-end to the apple, and a sticky surface. But there is a simple test for a cooker, taste them when they seem to be ready to pick, and if they are uneatably acid, then they are cookers.

Very difficult to identify apples to variety positively. Best to take some, leaf and fruit, to one of the Apple Day events that has an identification expert. Unfortunately this website, which previously listed all the apple days around the country, is still showing the 2010 list. 'Apple Day Events'

FWIW

Pie Apples/Cooking Apples (usu. Northern Spy when I was a kid) were tart but not acid and had solid, crisp flesh. Crab apples were sour, sometimes running to bitter, but not acid.

I don't think I've ever experienced an apple that I would call acidic.

-- Acidic IME belongs to citrus or pineapple and the like.

Cheers for the reply. Still at lost with them.

Sound like one of the English cider apples. I don't believe anyone other than a very experienced apple collector could possibly ID an apple other that the common varieties. 200 years ago there were thousands of different apples, every seed that sprouts potentially a different apple. They don't come true to seed!

Ah... Live and learn.

In Canada when I was growing up, there were three varieties of apple widely available as well as the wild things we called crab apples that made a very good jelly.

There may have been such things as cider apples but... apple cider was more of a legend than reality.