Malus domestica Seeds | Golden Delicious Apple
LATIN NAME: Malus domestica
COMMON NAME: Golden Delicious Apple
Plant Profile
Golden Delicious is a dessert apple with a pale green-gold skin, crisp, juicy flesh and a honeyed sweetness that made it one of the most planted apples of the twentieth century. The tree is vigorous and upright when young, spreading with age, and it crops heavily and reliably.
The fruit ripens in late September and keeps for months in cold storage, which is why it became a supermarket apple. It is also a good pollinator for other varieties, since it flowers over a long period and produces abundant pollen.
The variety was found as a chance seedling in West Virginia in the early twentieth century, and its parentage has since been traced to Grimes Golden, an older American apple. It is one of the most widely grown apples in the world, and it is the parent of many modern cultivars.
Science & Biotechnology
Apple seeds contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the seed is crushed and moistened. A few seeds swallowed whole pass through harmlessly, but chewing a large quantity is genuinely dangerous, and apple seed extract is not a safe home remedy.
Growing an apple from seed does not reproduce the parent. Apples are heterozygous and self-incompatible, so a seedling is a new variety, usually inferior to the one it came from. That is why named apples are grafted onto rootstock, and why a seed-grown Golden Delicious will give something else entirely.
The sweetness of the variety comes from a high sugar content with relatively low acidity, and the aroma from a set of esters dominated by hexyl acetate and butyl acetate. Storage changes that profile: apples held too long develop a bland, mealy texture as the pectin breaks down.
Uses & Benefits
Golden Delicious is eaten fresh, baked, sauced and dried, and it is one of the best apples for sauce because it breaks down readily and needs little sugar. It is also used as a pollinator in orchards and as a parent in breeding.
In the garden the tree is grown as a standard, a half-standard or a trained form, and it needs a pollinator of a different variety nearby. Commercially the fruit is a major international crop, and the seed is sold to growers interested in breeding rather than in fruiting, since seedlings do not come true.
Growing from Seed
Sow the seed in autumn in a pot of moist compost and leave it outside through winter, or stratify for eight to twelve weeks at 3-5°C. Germination is slow and uneven, and the seedlings are variable. Expect fruit in five to eight years, of unknown quality.
For a fruiting tree, plant a grafted specimen rather than a seedling, in full sun and well-drained soil, with a pollinator within 20 m. Prune in winter to an open goblet shape, and thin the fruit in June if the set is heavy. Water in dry spells in the first three years, and mulch with compost rather than manure.
Our Take
A seed worth growing for the experiment, not for the fruit: the tree will be an apple, but almost certainly not a Golden Delicious.
Related Reading
Gardeners who grow Golden Delicious Apple often pair it with these related subjects: