Gravenstein Apple

I love our Gravenstein, one of our oldest apple trees.  It is the very earliest  to bloom, although that is only every other year. Our Gravenstein is firmly biennial.

On the years it is bearing, it is the first apple to ripen for us. It ripens over a long time (some years up to 6 weeks), abundantly, with minimal codling moth damage.

Gravenstein is one of the best fresh eating apples, cooks up into great applesauce, beloved for pies and pastries, presses into yummy cider, and is delicious dried.

Besides being biennial, it is a triploid, so is unable to pollinate other apples while requiring pollination itself.  It is a sturdy long-lived tree.

Gravenstein is a very old apple, and very well-traveled.  It has a complicated history, known to be in Italy by the early 1600's,  and in Denmark by 1669 (collected from Hautecombe Abbey* in the French Alps).  The name we know it by is German.  It came to the US first on the northern California coast through the Russian  fur traders in the early 1800's, and to Canada's east coast (Nova Scotia) soon after that.  In less than 200 years, Gravenstein apple had circumnavigated the globe.

I consider Gravenstein to be one of the "must have" apples.

*Hautecombe Abbey dates back to 1101, and by 1214 had 2 daughter houses, in Italy and in Constantinople.  It is possible that the Gravenstein apple may have arrived in Italy and Savoy, France from that ancient capital.