Carina

Carina produces very large, mid-season, generally attractive bi-color apples. The fruit is fairly sweet with a pleasant appley flavor and very good texture. The fruit stores well, and very well with the use of MCP-1. The tree, blooming early mid-season, is precocious, very heavy annual bearing with good crop management, and of moderate vigor. It has good branch angles and is very easy to train. Carina has no specific disease resistance or susceptibility and is easy to grow in conventional and chemical substitution based organic programs. The cultivar produces very well from runted-out trees which can occur due to the heavy cropping. If harvest is delayed the fruit can develop very strong and, in my opinion, undesirable flavors. The fruit is susceptible to cheek and stem bowl cracking near harvest.

Pros: Large fruit, nice flavor and texture, ease of care and training, consistent heavy crops

Cons: Large fruit; some seasons the fruit has some rough russet; pronounced lenticels; fruit cracking

Recommendation: Specialty growers who can tolerate the sometimes rough appearance and occasional cracking, and who appreciate a well-liked (by customers), consistent heavy bearing cultivar

Origin: In 1993 I planted seeds from Goldrush apples obtained from Applesource. This row of seedlings was quite neglected and shaded, but after a number of years began to fruit. One apple which I found interesting was a medium-sized, yellow apple with a good crunch but not a whole lot of flavor. I thought it would be interesting to move this one out of the shade and into a managed orchard environment. I tentatively called it Golden Sun.

   It was top-worked onto a Nova ez gro stump. Both Maigold on a different stump and the Golden Sun failed to take and all grafts were lost. The Golden Sun was re-grafted the following year. I forgot about it for a while while the tree grew. Once the tree began to fruit I assumed that somehow I had gotten it mixed up with Maigold as the tree had large reddish apples with a good crunch and a nice sweet flavor. I obtained scionwood from Maigold to grow out trees to compare to the Golden Sun tree. After several years I knew that my slightly mysterious tree was not Maigold. I decided that the only way to confirm that it was Golden Sun and not something else by mistake was to graft and grow out trees from the original seedling. By this time the original tree was quite crowded and shaded by a big white pine and had almost no decent grafting wood on it. I decided to forge ahead with subpar grafting wood. After several years I confirmed that Golden Sun and the nice reddish fruit in my topwork row were one and the same.

   The name Ludicrisp was selected as a way of making fun of all the apples that have crisp in their names since the introduction of Honeycrisp, such as Candy Crisp, Kinder Crisp, Autumn Crisp, Crimson Crisp, Sun Crisp, Winecrisp, etc. MAIA has since named an apple Ludacrisp so we have changed the name to Carina, which is the name of a constellation.