Yes, Claude, the intention is to continue the study as best we can. This will likely take the form of fruit evaluation, and as far as the actual trees are concerned, cold damage, mortality and yield. Some of the physical attributes like growth rate, form, etc I will record more or less depending on the workload here.
As for Yarlington Mill, and for that matter, any fruit evaluated here, I tried hard to keep my brain completely out of it when recording. What I mean by that is to act like a grad student writing down numbers. Yarlington Mill is one, but there are others that made me pause, (see Malinda, seemingly ripe and tasty but scored a whopping 8 brix, which I did double-check), but record it I did, nonetheless. Honeycrisp, which averaged out at over 14, had some good tasting samples that measured 10 or less brix.
I am prepared for a whole lot of feedback on confirmations and contradiction on everything, not just the fruit measurements. Growers are going to see similarities and differences in the data, and hopefully we will all have a discussion and shake things out. On our end, and in other orchards we are going to find : identity errors (either in purchase or tagging), harvest maturity differences (suspect in the Yarlingon Mill case, since the appearance of the fruit lined up ), soil and tree management, growing region, and even micoclimates (even within the same orchard).
A lot of the data involved some averaging, not just with fruit bios but with physical characteristics as well. There were dramatic differences sometimes, with growth rate and cold damage. With some of these particulars the results were so erratic, I just tossed the data. With the fruit evaluations I left it in.
What I noticed with fruit for instance was that there were sometimes large differences in the readings from different trees in different locations, of different age, at different peaks in ripening, and in the length of time off that tree. These were all more surprising than I had anticipated, and I hope to investigate this further, since regarding cider making, these controls can alter the fruit characteristics hugely. Storage for instance seemed to change varieties into something entirely different. As for accuracy, I aim to use starch tests to set a base for testing next year.
Thanks for the comments. This is exactly the kind of thing we need in this forum, for growers to describe their experiences and understandings, especially when there are discrepancies. I put myself in a vulnerable position by throwing all this out there for rebuttal, and I am looking forward to it.
If every one of us commented on their experiences with 5 varieties, then we would really have something happening in this form, wouldn't we? The Kingston Black discussion is a case in point.
Walden Heights Nursery & OrchardZone 3 in Vermont