Granny Smith apple – care, taste and calories

A Granny Smith is not very noticeable in normal basic care:

• Location: Sun (to partial shade, see below)
• Soil: normal, loose garden soil
• Improve rather poor soils with compost / mature manure
• Keep moist after planting until the wood is well rooted
• In the first years of standing, an apple tree usually does not need any fertilizer
• If the tree then seems “hungry” at some point, organic fertilizer is mixed into the tree grate

The peculiarities of this variety rather concern the consideration of whether the apple should or can be planted in a German home garden.

Granny Smith comes from far away, originally and often today from Australia; the rest of the products currently on sale in stores come from South America, South Africa or New Zealand. There is a reason that most of the commercially available Granny Smiths are imported to us: Granny Smith prefers to grow in hot climates and also needs a long growing period in this to produce fully ripe apples.

The apple variety is specified for USDA winter hardiness zone 5 to 8 (maximum average minus between −28.8 ° C and −6.7 ° C) and thus initially appears perfectly suitable for our climate, because these are exactly the winter hardiness zones that occur in Germany . What the apple can withstand cold in the winter half-year, in return, it would like to be offered lush warmth in the summer half-year. Granny Smith needs these high temperatures, which is why apples in Germany only have a chance of really ripening in very good locations.

Granny Smith is said to be a little hesitant to begin wearing. When the yield starts late in the medium term, the apple tree should then produce good and fairly regular, pleasing quantities of apples.

Granny Smith grows medium to strong and quite bushy: it branches out easily on its own, with a growth rate of between 30 and 50 cm per year. It reaches a height of between 2.5 and 4.5 m and a width of 2.5 to 3.5 m; In order to keep this tree nice and airy (and thus as free from fungi as possible), a strong summer pruning is required. So summer pruning so that the tree, which is not exactly spoiled by warmth, has time to close the wounds and let the new shoots mature before the leaves are shed in winter.

Fruit: taste and harvest

The fruits of the Granny Smith are medium-sized and have a smooth, lightly speckled skin in the “apple greenest color” imaginable. The shell is covered with natural wax, which is sometimes called “slightly greasy shell”. The flesh inside is white, firm and juicy.

Granny Smith tastes slightly sour and refreshing, say the numerous fans of the exceptional grass-green apple, while its critics simply call it “very sour”. What is not quite true, a Granny Smith is no more sour than a supposedly much sweeter tasting Golden Delicious. It contains roughly the same amount of sugar as Golden Delicious, but has around three times as much malic acid.

“As much sugar as Golden Delicious” describes, depending on the season, a sugar content between 12 and 16% or Brix degrees (official measure for the sugar content, roughly corresponds to the percentage values); “Around three times as much acidity as Golden Delicious” means that a Granny Smith, unlike the Granny Smith, which is not exactly known as a taste miracle, is full of flavoring malic acids.

Granny Smith apples are only ripe for picking from the end of October (= apple stalk detaches itself almost by itself or very easily from the trunk); like most apples, the harvest is not ready for consumption until a little later, around two weeks after harvesting. Granny Smith can be stored very well, it can be kept well into April without any loss of quality.

The apple is eaten fresh; but is also very suitable as an addition to sweet and savory salads and for baking, because it does not turn brown very quickly and retains its shape even when the oven is hot.

If it was mentioned above that Granny Smith only matures in good locations with a lot of warmth, that does not have to prevent the proven fans of the green apple with the unique taste from having a Granny Smith in the garden.

First of all, there are some “good locations” in Germany with a mild climate. B. Usually temperatures with which a Granny Smith apple can do something.

And then a Granny Smith in the home garden is something completely different from a Granny Smith from intensive commercial fruit growing. Granny Smith has a characteristic as well as fine aroma, which not only “weakens” when it is immature. With a Granny Smith from commercial fruit growing, another risk of spoiling the taste is much greater: The restrained aroma does not really come into its own because traces of the up to 30 pesticides with which the commercial varieties are sprayed each season easily mix into the taste impression.

In the home garden you can try to ripen Granny Smith apples without the addition of chemical substances. This gives Granny Smith friends the chance to get to know their favorite apples in a completely new way: Without traces of the taste of pesticides, Granny Smith apples should be harvested fully ripe piece by piece in terms of taste. In the USA it has already been discovered that the popular apple can grow into Starform in a warm private garden – you can read it on the website of the US company “Orange Pippin Fruit Trees” about their Granny Smith, which was grown in Ithaca, New York: www.orangepippintrees. com / trees / apple-trees / granny-smith.

Calories

Always a joyful opportunity to report on the calorie content of an apple, since even the sweetest apple with nutritional values ​​around 50 kcal per 100 g cannot endanger a slim waist. A medium-sized Granny Smith weighing 170 g has a calorific value of 371 kJ or 90 kcal, a large Granny Smith weighing 230 g has 500 kJ or 120 kcal. For comparison: A medium-sized Granny Smith apple weighs exactly as much as a McFlurry with daim or a pack of Pringles Original, but only a quarter (McFlurry, 343 to 90 kcal) or a sixth (Pringles, 540 to 90 kcal) of the Calories.

In other words: around 7,000 superfluous calories stored as fat expand a person’s waist circumference by around 1 cm. 1550 days of “Pringles” instead of “Granny Smith” swell your core by about 100 cm (if it’s just the Pringles that you overeat). Nobody does that? Yes, more and more people are doing that, even if not for 1550 days in a row, but for decades; therefore obesity has been a widespread disease for a few years.

When it comes to the other ingredients, Granny Smith (like McFlurry) does not do so well: The variety grown for intensive commercial fruit growing (see below) has a low vitamin C content of 5 to 10 mg per 100 g, which is usually several times that of an average Boskop is exceeded (20-30 mg vitamin C per 100 grams).

With the secondary plant substances, minerals, trace elements, fiber and around 30 other vitamins that make the local fruit so healthy for us (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”), it is not that far away either. During the breeding of the intensive varieties, they were “lost” to a large extent, because the production of high-quality fruit is not the primary aim of breeding here. More important is a long shelf life, good resistance to the formation of pressure marks, high tolerance to herbicides and pesticides, properties such as low browning after cutting and more.

Another unpleasant consequence of the indifference to the valuable apple ingredients in intensive breeding affects allergy sufferers: Granny Smith (together with Braeburn, Gala, Golden Delicious and Jonagold) is an apple variety that is particularly often incompatible with apple allergy sufferers; obviously the human induced remixing of reduced ingredients is not as well tolerated as the composition developed by the apple itself in the course of a long evolution.

Caution: Granny Smith young trees often come from intensive production

Granny Smith apple trees are mostly grown as an intensive commercial variety, and these plants have “another small disadvantage”: They are more susceptible to disease than the old apple varieties, which are equipped with a full gene pool, if at all only very slowly changed by breeding. Together with Golden Delicious, Jonagold, Red Delicious, Gala, Elstar, Cox Orange and Boskoop, Granny Smith is one of the handful of intensely cultivated varieties that almost completely dominate the German trade … and are increasingly suspicious of enlightened consumers because they are in one Must be sprayed up to 30 times during the season.

How this came about and why it is so, you can read under “Gala apples – care instructions, taste and calories – commercial varieties and” real apples “. Granny Smith is a chance seedling, discovered in 1868 by Maria Ann Smith (“Granny” Smith) in Sydney, Australia and only later used as a commercial variety (here since around 1950). Originally a robust random seedling, presumed ancestors are the crab apple or European wild apple Malus sylvestris plus the cultivated apple Malus domestica. The Granny Smith is not related to Golden Delicious, the overzealous inbred variety of modern apple culture; his gene pool is likely to be a lot richer than that of one of (multiple) Golden Delicious descendants. However, as we now know, this does not help a young Granny Smith tree produced in a commercial setting, because apples, like humans, react epigenetically, adapting the activity and intercellular transmission of genes to their immediate environment. Therefore, Granny Smith.-Jungbaum from the intensive production of seasoned apple growers who work according to the old fruit-growing art is not necessarily recommended for planting in the home garden.

If you want to plant a sturdy, healthy apple, you should look for fruit growers who raise their apple trees in good ecological conditions. The question is whether you will definitely buy a Granny Smith from such a fruit grower – after all, Germany is currently on the way back to apple diversity, and you will be among the regional representatives of 400 to 500 old German apple varieties at organic fruit growers that have adapted to the conditions at your location.

Conclusion: A Granny Smith apple in the home garden will delight you if you like refreshing (to sour) apples and your garden of the Australian apple variety offers a sufficiently warm (micro) climate. However, you should make sure that you acquire a young tree that has been grown organically. The trees from young plant production for intensive fruit growing, which are increasingly being sold to private individuals, are, in the opinion of experienced apple growers, not easy to cultivate for private gardeners.