Norson Apple

Overview  

Norson is a prairie apple selected for cold climates, valued for heavy annual crops and late-season use compared to many other ultra-hardy apples.  

History & Parentage  

Prairie breeding sources list the lineage as Haralson × Rescue, with introduction through the Beaverlodge, Alberta program in the mid-1970s.  

Fruit Quality & Uses  

A good dessert apple with consistent yields and decent keeping. It's a later apple compared to other Nor series apples.  

Growth Habit & Spacing  

Moderate vigor, upright-spreading. Use standard apple spacing based on rootstock, often 15 ft. for semi-dwarf and 18–20+ ft vigorous. Tighter spacing for these rootstocks can be applied with more pruning.  

Pollination

Not self-fertile. Pollenize with any other apple or crabapple with overlapping bloom. In a mixed planting, any other mid-bloom apple plus a crabapple is typically a safe strategy.  

Cold Hardiness

Solid zone 2 apple in Montana. Purvis lists it as zone 1 but Alaska Fruit Tree notes it as a zone 2. Will work for just about all of Montana, even some of the coldest places east of the divide, though plant with good air drainage and avoid depressions/frost pooling areas if planted in places like colder areas of eastern MT or interior Alaska (i.e. Fairbanks).

Whole-and-cut photo: Resolution enhanced from a public domain image. The crabapple is unchanged, but some of the surrounding text and numbers may vary.

About the photo: this isn’t Norson itself. Photos of Norson are either under copyright or simply unavailable, so we picked the open-source image that looks closest to the fruit. Photo: “Apples on tree 2021 G1” by George Chernilevsky, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.