Crow Mountain Orchard is home to the Cumberland Spur apple. As reported in the Huntsville Times on December 9, 1998:
Crow Mountain Orchard is home to the Cumberland Spur apple. As reported in the Huntsville Times on December 9, 1998:
Bob Deutscher has spent 40 years trying to perfect his apple crop. But it took an imperfection he discovered at his Crow Mountain Orchards near here to produce an apple that might revolutionize the global fruit market.
The US Patent Office recently approved Deutscher's request for a patent on a type of Red Delicious apple that is not grown anywhere else in the world. He named the apple Cumberland Spur because it's grown on the Cumberland Plateau and the tree's buds are formed from several spurs on the limb....
Only about 100 of 25,000 apple trees are the Cumberland Spur variety, which has its origin in the mutated limb of a Red Delicious Oregon Spur. Deutscher discovered the mutated limb about eight years ago.
He said the limb was about head-high and had about a dozen apples that were each about the size of a golf ball and were red, while all the other apples on the tree and in the orchard were green.
"I thought the limb was dying," Deutscher said. But when he returned to the limb in two weeks, he was surprised to find that the apples had grown bigger....
After a year of watching the limb, Deutscher attached it to a root stock to produce a tree that would bear only these apples....
He said he had been advised by Dr. Arlie Powell, a horticulturist at Auburn University, to keep his discovery confidential until he got a patent on the fruit tree....
In a news release Tuesday, Powell said Cumberland Spur's trademark red blush and its superior flavor will give the state's Red Delicious growers a competitive edge in the global Market.