Hooray for 'Honeycrisp'^tm-and 'Zestar!'^tm
Northern Gardener Jan. 2001

I’ll bet many of you ran into the same problem I did last fall. Local orchards, including the Apple House at the University of Minnesota’s Horticultural Research Center just west of the Landscape Arboretum, sold out of ‘Honeycrisp’ apples in the blink of an eye. If you were lucky, you could buy them at your local supermarket. That is, if you were willing to pay $1.99 to $2.99 a pound for them, shipped in from orchards in the Pacific Northwest!

‘Honeycrisp’, for the uninitiated, is the heir apparent to ‘Haralson’ apple’s title as Minnesota’s favorite apple. The work of the horticulture department’s fruit breeders, this exceptional cultivar was introduced in 1991 by the University of Minnesota’s Experiment Station. It has steadily gained in popularity ever since. ‘Honeycrisp’ apples are prized for their fresh-eating quality, though they can also be used in pies and sauce. Most people fall in love with their crisp, juicy texture and sweet, slightly aromatic flavor. Once you’ve tried ‘Honeycrisp’ apples, you’ll want to eat them again and again.

‘Honeycrisp’ was 30 years in the making, from the original cross of two parents to the final introduction in 1991. It is the most widely planted variety in Minnesota orchards, and it is being tested in other apple-growing regions of the world, including Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.

If you’ve got a sunny site with reasonably good soil that drains well, why not plan to grow your own ‘Honeycrisp’ tree? The trees are suitable for the central and southern part of the state. In protected sites you can even grow ‘Honeycrisp’ as a dwarf tree. While slightly less hardy, dwarf apple trees produce fruit at a younger age and are much easier to care for. Routine maintenance activities such as spraying, pruning, and harvesting are far less challenging due to the trees’ more manageable size. On average, ‘Honeycrisp’ apples are ready for harvest the last week into September. They store nicely into March, providing you can keep from gobbling them up in the meantime!

If you’d like to try growing an earlier apple, look for the university’s newest introduction, ‘Zestar!’. This tasty apple typically ripens the second week in August, but may be stored for seven weeks, considerably longer than other early apples that tend to get mealy after a very short time in storage. Though not as exceptional as ‘Honeycrisp’, ‘Zestar!’ is still rated very highly for flavor, with a nice balance of sweetness and acidity. Considered better than ‘State Fair’, ‘Paulared’, or ‘Beacon’, ‘Zestar!’ is clearly the best early apple for cold climates.

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