Jonagold has large, juicy, aromatic fruit with an exceptional flavour that earns it very high reviews. Its flavour is sweet, balanced with acidity, making it a refreshing snack. It ripens late in apple season. Its fruit is excellent for fresh eating, baking, sauce, cider, dehydrating, and anything else you can think to do with apples. Jonagold can be a heavy cropper that sometimes causes it to bear every other year, so should be thinned to moderate the crop load and ensure annual fruiting (like many apples, really). Pollination: Jonagold is what’s called a triploid apple – meaning it has three sets of chromosomes, rather than the two sets that most apples have (we as humans also have two sets of chromosomes, and like most apples, we are diploid organisms). This means that in a situation where there are only two apple trees around, Jonagold could get pollinated and make fruit just fine, but Jonagold wouldn’t pollinate the other apple tree, and that apple tree would not have any fruit. So Jonagold works great in a situation where there is a crabapple nearby – the crabapple would pollinate Jonagold just fine. Or Jonagold would work great in a group of three (or more) apple trees – the two others would pollinate each other as well as Jonagold. Disease resistance: Jonagold is one of the apples I sell because it is such a good eating apple, despite being susceptible to fire blight and scab. Both of these can be dealt with – fire blight with pruning, scab with multiple factors (siting, orchard sanitation, spraying if need be). Jonagold is one of the few apples susceptible to something called bitter pit, which is caused by a calcium deficiency, and can be prevented by several means. Read this article by the Royal Horticultural Society if you’d like to learn more. Parentage: Golden Delicious x Jonathan (an old American variety discovered in the 1820s), developed at Cornell University in New York in the 1940s and 50s, and officially released in 1968. References: Cornell document on Jonagold. Apples of Our Eye: A Love Letter to Cornell’s Fabulous Fruit. Orange Pippin article on Jonagold. Apple Cultivars and Their Uses. Image 1: Green Thumbs Garden. Image 2: Sven Teschke.
