Our ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ cooking apple tree is now eight years old and has always produced the large, green, acidic cooking apples that one would expect from it. This year, however, it is laden with masses of huge red apples that are sweet enough to eat. Why has our tree suddenly started producing red, sweet, eating apples, instead of normal Bramleys?
Sometimes, Bramley apples can flush orange, with broad, red stripes that make them look very rosy-red, though this usually happens on only one side of the fruit. Perhaps this apparent change is down to the fact that the combination of a heavily fruiting tree and the hot summer has meant the apples have ripened properly for once, and you are now seeing its fruit in their true colours. Bramleys are certainly a lot more flushed when they’ve been allowed to ripen on the tree than you ever find them in the shops.
Even so, I wouldn’t call their fruit sweet exactly, although you can sometimes eat Bramleys late, say in spring, and be almost persuaded that they are an eater.
Otherwise, the only explanation is that the rootstock has started fruiting. Perhaps the tree is sprouting below the graft union just above soil level, but because it has grown over the years, you haven’t noticed. If the fruits from the rootstock are sweet, I’d take that as a welcome bonus. Either that, or a local fruit fairy has snuck in and secretly grafted an eating apple variety to all the branches.
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