Tolman Sweet Apple (Spring 2027)

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

Overview

Tolman Sweet is an old New England sweet apple. It's pale yellow, very sweet and firm, and it's best known as a baking and cooking apple.

Origin and History

Nobody's sure exactly where it started. S.A. Beach's The Apples of New York (1905) credits it to Rhode Island in one place and mentions an 1891 claim that it came from Dorchester, Massachusetts, in another. The earliest description he could find was from 1822, and even that author couldn't trace it. Beach wrote that it was "more generally grown in the home orchards of this state than any other sweet apple." It shows up in other family trees too. DNA work done with the Maine Heritage Orchard found it's a parent of the Maine apples Gray Pearmain and Green Monster.

Fruit and Uses

The fruit is medium or a little smaller, roundish, and pale clear yellow, sometimes with a light blush. Beach describes the flesh as white, firm, "rather hard," and "decidedly sweet," and says it was "much esteemed for certain culinary purposes as pickling, boiling and baking." In a regular cellar it lasted from November to January, and in cold storage into February to April. It bruises easily, so handle it carefully.

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 calls the tree "a good grower, long-lived and very hardy," with a spreading, drooping shape, and says it bears fairly young and is a reliable cropper. He also notes it was often used as a stock to top-graft less hardy varieties onto.

Pollination

It needs a pollenizer and blooms mid-season. Haralson, Macoun, Cortland, Frostbite, Wolf River and Kerr all overlap.

Cold Hardiness

Beach wrote that across northern New York, northern New England, parts of Canada and the northern prairie apple country, Tolman Sweet had "the reputation of being one of the hardiest of the old New England varieties." That's encouraging, but it's not a number. We've listed it at zone 4 for now, and we'll update it once we've wintered our own trees.

Image credit: watercolor of the ‘Tolman Sweet’ apple by Amanda Newton, USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

About the photo: this isn’t Tolman Sweet itself. Photos of Tolman Sweet are either under copyright or simply unavailable, so we picked the open-source image that looks closest to the fruit. Photo: “Weisser Klarapfel Freilichtmuseum Roscheider Hof Frucht H16” by Helge Klaus Rieder, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC0. Other photo: “Gibson Square apple tree (2)” by Oaktree b, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.