Trail Crabapple (Spring 2027)

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

Overview

Trail is a big, sweet crabapple from Ottawa that doubles as a very good cider apple. Quebec cider makers knew it for years as Bilodeau before DNA testing showed it was Trail all along.

Origin and History

Trail came out of the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa from a cross of Northern Queen and Rideau, and W.R. Leslie's 1946 Morden bulletin dates it to 1911. Its second life started in the 1980s, when a mislabeled tree ended up with Claude Bilodeau in Quebec. It was later named Bilodeau and caught on with cider makers, and in 2022 DNA testing by Paul Kron at the University of Guelph (per Silver Creek Nursery) showed Bilodeau and Trail are the same apple. St. Lawrence Nurseries reports the same result. Don't confuse it with Trailman, which is a different applecrab from a cross of Trail and Osman.

Fruit and Uses

W.T. Macoun described it in 1916 as "large for a crab, a little larger than Martha," pale yellow splashed and washed with orange-red and crimson, with crisp, breaking flesh and a sprightly, "very pleasant" flavor. Leslie's Morden notes put it at about 1½ inches, "very juicy, sweetly sub-acid, sprightly, free of astringency," and "very good as dessert, excellent for cooking." It ripens in late August on the prairies and a bit later in other places. For cider, St. Lawrence Nurseries calls it "particularly good for cidermaking, thanks to its high sugar and high acid." Silver Creek measured a specific gravity of 1.070 and 12.8 g/L acid with fairly low tannin, and recommends it for jelly too.

Growth Habit and Spacing

Ours are grafted onto Malus baccata full size rootstock, the hardiest rootstock we work with. Expect a full size tree and plan on 18 to 20 feet between them. Leslie described the tree as hardy, productive and roundish.

Pollination

Trail needs a pollenizer and blooms mid-season. Kerr, Haralson, Goodland, Frostbite, Wolf River and Otterson crab all overlap.

Cold Hardiness

St. Lawrence Nurseries rates Trail to -50F or colder, and it was described as hardy in the Morden, Manitoba trials. That makes it one of the toughest cider apples you can plant.

Photo credit: USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System, Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, accession PI 589339. Public domain (U.S. government work).

About the photo: this isn’t Trail itself. Photos of Trail are either under copyright or simply unavailable, so we picked the open-source image that looks closest to the fruit. Photo: “-2019-09-15 Fruit on a Crab-apple tree, Trimingham” by Kolforn, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.