About The Apples

This season we have a few more of our own apples than last year, although we certainly didn't have a bumper crop. Most of our apples come from Németh Gyula and his team at Organic Kingdom, in the east of the country. The quality and quantity of these apples and pears means that we can offer a range for a long winter season, going right through to the spring, but at this time of year we also sell a few of our own apples. At Zsámboki Biokert we only have about 50 trees and around half of these are apples with a few pears (the rest are more wild varieties of fruit). We purposely planted old varieties, more really as a biodiversity conservation exercise than as a commercial enterprise. As vegetable growers our focus is on the veggies, which leaves little time and energy to devote to the fruit trees. We chose to go with low maintenance trees, and to be honest this reflects in the quality. Our apples are delicious, but not the varieties that you get in the shops. They are full of blemishes, bruises and mishapenness, but you can't beat the subtlety of their flavour. Not just each variety, but each apple tastes different. Unfortunately, so far we don't have a lot to offer. We each year hope there will be more on the trees - this year the frost came at flowering time, so we lost many fruits before they even set. But the trees themselves bring a different quality to our garden, and year by year the orchard matures.