Autumn Strawberry Apple (Spring 2027)

This is our first year growing Autumn Strawberry, so everything below is secondhand until we get more long-term data from our own mother trees.

Overview

Autumn Strawberry is an old New York dessert apple, pale yellow covered in pinkish-red, and in its day a lot of people considered it one of the best eating apples of the fall.

Origin and History

In S.A. Beach's The Apples of New York (1905), Autumn Strawberry is listed as another name for Late Strawberry, which originated in Aurora, Cayuga County, New York. It was described as a new apple in 1848. Beach notes that several different apples have gone by Late Strawberry over the years, but by his time the name was "almost exclusively applied" to this one. It's not the same apple as Chenango Strawberry.

Fruit and Uses

Beach calls it "an attractive apple, pale yellow overspread or striped and splashed with light and dark red, very good in quality especially for dessert use," and says "many esteem it one of the best dessert apples of its season." The flesh is yellowish-white, fine, crisp, tender and juicy, with a sprightly, aromatic, subacid flavor. Size runs from a bit below medium to above. It comes into use in September and keeps ripening over several weeks, and Beach gives its season as September to December. That staggered harvest is handy in a backyard, where you want apples over several weeks instead of all at once.

Growth Habit and Spacing

Ours are on Bud 118 semi-dwarf rootstock. Plan on about 15 feet between trees, up to 18 feet for airflow. Beach describes the tree as vigorous, "hardy, healthy, long-lived and a regular cropper," with moderate to heavy crops every other year or nearly every year.

Pollination

It needs a pollenizer. We're estimating it blooms mid-season, so pair it with something like Haralson, Macoun, Cortland, Frostbite, Wolf River or Kerr.

Cold Hardiness

Beach called the tree hardy, but that was in New York and he didn't put a number on it. We've listed it at zone 4 for now as an estimate, and we'll update it once we've wintered our own trees.

Illustration: “Late Strawberry” (the older name for Autumn Strawberry) by Deborah Griscom Passmore, USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection, Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library (POM00002605). Public domain.

About the photo: this isn’t Autumn Strawberry itself. Photos of Autumn Strawberry are either under copyright or simply unavailable, so we picked the open-source image that looks closest to the fruit. Photo: “Червоне яблуко (13692684585)” by teteria sonnna from Obukhiv, Ukraine, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.