The flavors are mild. I would put it in a class I call light eating, which I’ve come to appreciate more over the past few years. it has a nice juicy texture that is easy to eat and the flavors tend to be mild. The flesh is somewhat coarse, cleaving, not very crunchy or crisp, but not mushy or mealy either. It doesn’t have the snappy, crisp, crunchy texture that everyone is so mad about because we all have PRDSD (post red delicious stress disorder;) but it’s very nice. The skin is pleasantly thin. There are some subtle fruit, or fruit candy flavors in the background and maybe a little spice, but mostly I think of things like melon or sugarcane. It has a hint of that indescribable “Wickson thing” that is also in some other etter apples, but not a lot of it, and not as much as I had hoped. The sugar is moderate. I'd have liked more, but you could hardly make a piece of fruit too sweet for me. When I add sugar to my coffee it's closer to a 1/4 cup than a teaspoon. It's not particularly lacking in sugars, I was just hoping for some of Wicksons wicked sweetness. It is definitely a mild apple. If you eat something intensely flavorful and sugary before hand, it could taste bland or watery even, but on it’s own, it is a refreshing and tasty apple. Keep in mind too that this is it's very first fruiting and in a drought year at that. It could change or improve as the tree fruits in coming years under varying conditions. Really I need a few more years to assess it and eat a lot more of them. Which brings me to the next point.

I have over 120 seedlings growing here now. Only those first few Wickson seeds, which I believe total just four, are open pollinated. The rest are intentional cross pollinations between two deliberately chosen parents. Quite a few of those are crosses made with Wickson. So, I’d like some more time to fruit out some of those other Wickson offspring (hopefully starting this spring!), so I can start comparing them all. I don’t want to get over excited about my seedlings and name all of them when they may not hold up over time in real life scenarios. Anyone is going to be prejudiced regarding their creations, but I hope to be fairly ruthless in my culling and assessment. A main point of doing this at all is to generally improve apples. I grow a lot of heirloom apples and have found the same thing that Albert Etter found, which is that they could generally use improvement. Anyhoo, under other circumstances, I would be likely to sit on this apple, grow it for some years, eat a lot of them, maybe share a few scions to get impressions from some of my apple homies out there, feed it to as many people as possible, and generally proceed cautiously. Actually, considering all of that, I’d say there is a good chance I wouldn’t name it at all.

BUT!

But I’m just perennially annoyed by the whole can’t grow apples from seed thing, and this is a good apple. My impression eating it this year is that it is at least in the top 25% of apples I grow here in terms of being something I want to eat, and I saw a lot of people eat it and enjoy it and say nice things about it. AND it is just so not what it’s “supposed” to be. I mean this is literally 1 seed=1 good apple. That isn’t some kind of magical luck. I picked a good parent and I got a good apple. No doubt there is some luck involved, but it ain’t likely one in thousands or tens of thousands type of luck. So I decided to name it anyway. This is my poster child for growing apples from seed. Whether it stands the test of time or not is not really the point. It could suffer terribly from diseases, the flavor could prove cloying, it might bear irregularly, or grow funny, or taste of pepperoni and worm castings in a bad year, or any number of other things. The point is that it’s at least good (if not very good :) and not a hard, sour, bitter, green spitter that only a bear could love. So I named this apple: