Crab · 1 trees planted · confidence medium
A large crabapple at 1-2 inches — well above typical crab size — greenish-yellow with red blush and stripes, with juicy crisp flesh and a sweet-sharp, mildly astringent flavor. Genuinely multipurpose for fresh eating, sauce, jelly and cider, and reported at about 11.4% sugar, enough to ferment past 5% ABV. Bears heavy crops young and is best blended with other early-season fruit, particularly bittersweets, since it ripens well ahead of the bittersweets in this planting.
Disease: Reported as having good general disease resistance and exceptional cold hardiness; Montana State historically recommended it as a top crabapple for the state. No specific scab or fireblight ratings from any trial.
Discrepancies: Origin, date and fruit description corroborate cleanly across Montana State Extension and multiple nurseries. Not in the WSU database — the only crab evaluated there is Virginia Crab (Hewes) — so there is no maritime-WA juice analysis, and the 11.4% sugar figure comes from a nursery rather than a trial. Sources disagree on how much this is a cider apple at all: Montana State and most nurseries frame it as a dessert/culinary crab with cider as a secondary use, while cider-specific listings emphasize the fermentation potential. Recorded it as a crab with medium rather than high tannin, following the fresh-eating descriptions, because nothing measured supports a high-tannin claim. Ploidy set to unknown — no source states it, and inferring diploid from its use as a pollinizer would be a guess.