Mystery apple tree

In 2003 when we moved to our current house we ordered two heritage apple trees for the garden (our house was built before the first world war on land which had been orchards so we liked the idea of growing apple trees there again.) One variety was Pigs Nose Pippin, a local variety of dessert apple which was small and sweet. The tree took six years to produce any fruit, and when the fruit ripened they were bright green cooking apples - obviously not the variety they were meant to be. I emailed the firm but had no reply.
Today we took some of the apples to be identified at the Big Apple event near to us. It turns out that the apples are a very old variety called Winter Greening or French Crab (also called Old Ironsides!!). They have been grown since before the 1700s but are now very rare - in fact the man who looked at them could tell us that there is one such tree in Gloucestershire and another in Carmarthen and that's it as far as he knows. Apparently the fruit has the reputation of keeping very well - it is rumoured that previous generations used to store them for two years in dry sand!
So not what we thought we were getting, but worth having!!

Result!!!

So presumably you are now/or will shortly be working on a business plan to make them more widespread...

That's lovely, Dandelion, are you going to propogate it?

One of the men we were talking to at the Big Apple was encouraging us to try grafting (but from the point of view that we hadn't got what we wanted so could maybe beg some material from someone who had a Pigs Nose Pippin and graft it on to our tree.) I must admit it has got me interested - I have never tried anything like this before (just ordinary things like taking cuttings) so it could be a learning curve!

go on, gal, go for it

Nothing to lose and there are some wonderful books on grafting techniques and propgation out there