Apple: Niedzwetzkyana

A beautiful antique crab apple, with tart berry flavours, and bright red flesh!

• Vigour: High
• Precociousness: Medium
• Resistances: Unknown
• Size of fruit: Small to medium
• Flowering: Early
• Fruiting: Early
• Cropping: Medium to heavy
• Ploidy: Diploid
• Fruit colour: Red
• Flesh colour: Red
• Leaf colour: Red, going to bronze-green later in the season
• Parentage: Wild
• Descendants: Albert Etters red apples
• Biennialism: None observed
• Growth habit: Standard
• Self-fertile: No

A wild apple native to the regions that cover all the way from Siberia, through Kazakhstan, and into Turkestan.
Modern Niedzwetzkyana apples typically descend from seeds collected by Vladislav Niedziecki in the late 1800s, that were later raised by Georg Dieck in Merseburg, Germany.

Noted for it's bright red flesh and sweet-tart berry flavours, it's also said to have a sparkling flavour (likely due to the high acidity), and a hard (not crisp) texture.

They are, like many wild/crab apples, quite tolerant of drought conditions, and are equally as tolerant of low and high temperatures.

Anecdotal evidence shows a resistance to fire-blight, rust, and scab, though woolly aphid resistance is unknown.

This variety has been hypothesised as being the most likely ancestor of almost all red fleshed apples available, and was used extensively by Albert Etter in his experimental orchards to create his now famous apples Grenadine, Rubaiyat

NOTE: I have yet to try this apple directly, having only planted seeds from it in 2021, and so have relied on others for information related to this variety.
This entry will be updated as the tree grows and bears.