Description
The ‘Wealthy’ apple has great flavour and is a tried and true dessert apple. Many consider it among their favourites in flavour. It has a lovely sweet taste with a great aroma, reminiscent of berries. It is also great cooked. It can be stored for approximately 4 months. It shows good resistance to scab and fire blight and is a super tough tree, hardy to zone 3. It’s bloom time is early to middle.
Apples are a cornerstone in cold climate fruit production. You will need 2 different varieties in order for the apple trees to cross pollinate and become fruitful. We try to focus on cultivars that are largely disease resistant, and low maintenance to allow even those without a lot of experience to successfully grow fruit. All of our apple trees are grown on full sized standard root stock of either Antonovka, or Dolgo meaning they will grow to be 30 ft or so tall. These types of rootstocks fare much better in colder climates than dwarf rootstock. On average, they will take 4 to 5 years to produce apples and will continue to for many years!
Important Information
| Latin name | Malus |
| Hardiness Zone | 2 |
| Height | 25-35 ft |
| Spread | 30 ft |
| Sun Requirements | Full sun to part sun |
| Average year to bear fruit | 5-7 |
| Harvest Time | September |
| Soil | prefers moist well drained soil |
| Flower Time | May |
| Pollination | needs two different trees to cross pollinate and fruit |
The History of the Wealthy Apple
It has a great story behind it: a gentleman in Minnesota in 1860 named Peter Gideon is responsible for breeding this great cultivar- it was one of the very first apples to be produced that far north. Before him, only crab apples would grow there. He moved to Minnesota and attempted to cultivate many seeds from trees that lived at his former property in Illinois. The seedlings by and large didn’t survive the harsh climate.
He was almost out of money and times were tough for his family. As a last ditch effort he purchased seeds from Albert Emerson of Bangor, Maine who had been working with seedlings imported from Russia. Peter grew these out and as time passed he noticed a unique tree that was very cold hardy and incredible in flavour- nothing like he’d ever experienced in Minnesota. He quickly made the genetics available to the public and named it after his wife, Wealthy Gideon. Over the next 50 years it became one of the most widely planted and important apples in the midwest.
