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by hosh 2531 days ago
Back when I lived in Seattle, the Honeycrisp at the farmer's market down the street were ginormous. I had never seen them that size anywhere else in the country.
1 comments

For what it's worth, apple size is largely a function of how hard the grower 'thins' the developing crop. If they remove most of the fruitlets early on such that there is fewer than one apple left on the tree per blossom cluster, huge fruits can result. Thinning to one-per-cluster is kind of average, and those little "lunchbox" apples are grown 2+ per cluster.
Fair enough. Maybe that is why the smaller orchards and packers have larger fruits.

From what I understand, not only do consumers not want larger apple sizes, because the honeycrisp bruise so easily, larger honeycrisps are a PITA to manage.