Stopped at the border

Above:Apples for sale at the Marche Jean-Talon in Montreal in early September. ¶ 

I spent a week in Quebec in late summer of 2023. ¶ 

The trip gave me a crack at some new apples, and I got to practice my (not very accomplished) French.

But I also encountered a puzzle: apples everywhere in Canada that are just not grown in the US.

These include

• Sunrise, refreshing and fine, with a great crunch*
• Lobo, a high-quality early Mac-type
• Melba, which struck me as a culinary apple, though with some interesting flavors out of hand
• The aptly named Belle d'Août
• Delcorf, whose lush flavors are balanced by a little spice

*Okay, I did find Sunrise in Vermont. At one orchard. About 30 miles from Quebec.

A line on a map

Not all of these apples were, perhaps, destined for greatness, but what struck me was how profoundly the pomological landscape changed at the border.

That despite the US–Canada frontier being quite open and the geographical landscape being essentially unchanged. A border is just a line on a map.

It's also not the case that tastes are radically different between Vermont and Quebec. I am not reporting anything like "Canadians prefer soft apples that would not be popular in the US."

Any of the varieties I found would have been quite at home in any orchard in New England. Yet I think they are unknown here.

This part of the world has been pretty open to Canadian cultivars, historically.

So what gives?

A thickening plot

Canadians also eat an apple called Red Prince that is not known here. It's originally Dutch.

Perhaps Canadian growers are particularly open to modern European cultivars, though Opal has done well here in the US, and Topaz, among others, has a following.

Lobo and Melba, both McIntosh-derived, have a wealth of close equivalents here. Perhaps it's just inertia that keeps them in Canada.

But Sunrise is a high-quality early apple, filling a somewhat vacant niche in the apple calendar.

Red Prince is, reputedly, one of those apples that improves in storage, making it a candidate for the winter.

Perhaps US growers have become hypnotized by the lure of a Honeycrisp successor to the exclusion of all else.

More trip notes

A late frost in May damaged the apple crop in Massachusetts, but really devastated orchards in Vermont. Many had no apples at all.

The lake effect must have helped to save the harvest at Hacketts Orchard, where I found Blushing Delight. The orchard is on Grand Isle in Lake Champlain.

That's also where I found Sunrise. Above, washing the harvest at Hackett's.