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Early Red Bird
type: Culinary, Dessert, Pie, Sauce
synonyms: Crimson Beauty (this name is also used for a limb mutation of Crimson Beauty of Bath ), Red Bird
summary: A well-flavoured cooking and fresh-eating apple, one of the first apples of the season. Great for pies but tends to be a touch on the soft side. Developed in eastern Canada during the late 1800s.
identification: Medium in size, round though often not uniform in shape, skin flushed red over a greenish-yellow base colour. Sparse whitish lenticels.
characteristics: White flesh with red stains under the skin on sun side when fully ripe; soft and juicy. Sweet sharp with a taste of raspberry.
uses: Unique in that it produces a pink apple sauce. Tastes good eaten fresh. Very popular fried in a batter as a breakfast dish.
origins: Developed in the mid-1860s by noted Canadian horticulturalist Francis Peabody Sharp at his Upper Woodstock Nurseries in the Saint John River Valley of New Brunswick (Canada). He had wanted to come up with a hardy variety that would mature early in Maritime Canada and ordered 1000 seeds from Russia which he subsequently germinated. One of these seedlings bore fruit just four seasons after it had be planted. He cross-pollinated this these with pollen from a Fameuse , then planted the 1,800 seeds resulting from that cross and then selected the seedling that bore the earliest fruit. Initially, it was called the Early Scarlet, but later renamed the Crimson Beauty. When the Stark Brothers Nursery acquired the rights to this apple after the turn of the century, it was referred to as the Early Red Bird, which name it still carries.
cultivation: Vigorous, upright-spreading, spur bearer.
progeny: Caravel
cold storage: These apples do not keep well in storage.
harvest: Ready for harvest late in the second period or early in the third.
pollination group: B
pollination peak: 6
ploidism: Diploid. Self sterile.
harvest period: 2
hardiness: 4
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