Dessert · 10 trees planted · confidence medium
A major Eastern European culinary apple with pure white, aromatic, strongly acidic flesh that sweetens only when fully ripe, used for cooking and juice as much as fresh eating, and useful as a high-acid blending component. It is better known outside Russia as a seedling rootstock, producing vigorous, deep-taprooted, well-anchored, standard-sized, very cold-hardy trees. Flowering group 3 and not self-fertile, so it needs a pollination partner.
Disease: Reported scab resistant, drought tolerant and exceptionally cold hardy — seedling rootstocks are rated to about -45C, USDA zone 3. Slow to come into bearing, then crops heavily. Cold hardiness is largely irrelevant at this site; the scab resistance is the useful trait on the Olympic Peninsula, though it is not backed by trial data.
Discrepancies: Not in the WSU database, so no maritime-WA data. The substantive problem is that Antonovka is a cultivar group, not a single variety, which makes several widely repeated claims unreliable. Ploidy: changed from diploid to unknown on cross-check — Common Antonovka is generally treated as diploid, but the group includes Antonovka ploskaya, a tetraploid used in breeding, so the label alone does not fix ploidy. The comes true from seed claim is repeated by nearly every nursery but is horticultural shorthand for unusually uniform seedlings, not genetic truth; seedlings vary. Second ambiguity, and the one that matters for the orchard record: Antonovka is sold both as a scion cultivar and as a seedling rootstock, so an entry labeled Antonovka may describe either. Recommend the owner confirm whether these are grafted Antonovka scions or Antonovka-rooted trees of another variety before the record is trusted.