What varieties of quince are good for fresh eating? Anyone care to share their experience with quinces?
I bought some quinces from Kiyokawa (?) orchards in the fruit loop, and they tasted okay. I cooked them according to the Joy of Cooking recipe: basically baked them with orange slices and a little sugar, and some apple juice to keep them moist. They tasted alright, but nothing to write home about. I liked them a lot more than my wife did.
Anyway, anyone have any thoughts on other quince varieties? Or is that just the way quinces are?
Depends on your taste. Smyrna is edible raw if you pick it fully ripe and hold it in storage for a few weeks. I've tested several others and found some that are more tender, with fewer grit cells, but most of the ones that are easy to eat tend to split and don't keep well, And they never get truly sweet in the NW. It takes a hotter climate for that .
I have one that is sold by One Green World that is now marketed as Crimea. We are talking about Russian quinces when we talk about fresh eating ones. There is one called Pineapple-Aromatnaya. It truly tastes like pineapple, as does mine. It is available at Uwajimaya in Beaverton and at other high end grocery stores, probably New seasons.
Quince is one of my favorite fruits. It is like an English style apple, yet perhaps even more flavorful. I eat mine in small slices because it is so flavorful. By the way, it also takes away my arthritis. Lon is right that some will split. I eat them first. Some will get fungus. Most quince seem to get rust. I used fungal oriented compost tea and it took care of that. They overproduce every year. I froze some and they are great frozen and thawed. I am going to experiment with storing some this year unfrozen, so I am eating all those that don't look perfect first. Mine are in full sun, and I find that they get plenty sweet for me. They ripen, come off the tree easily and fall.
I can't imagine not growing quince, although it was an afterthought a few years ago when I bought one.
John S
PDX OR
On Saturday night, I made a quince and apple crisp with quinces from New Seasons. It was a completely different experience than the week before. What a great cobbler! There is a great depth to their taste that seems to complement apples well.
Now I am thinking about quinces too. I bet I could graft quince on Hawthorne? I am not 100% sure it is black Hawthorne. But I bet that would give me a year or two headstart, as the tree is thin but taller than me.
Making jams and jellies from quinces sounds fun too.
Thank you for your recommendations. What families of quinces are there? Russian and ???
I guess I will go look on wikipedia
I think of the main categories as fresh eating and cooking quince. It is most popular around Iran and Turkey, often cooked with meat. They all are fragrant, but I think the cooking ones fill up the house with fragrance, and I do agree with Lon that they store better. I like the strong flavor and better anti-oxidants/nutrition/convenience of the fresh eating ones.
You could ask Karen T about the grafting, but I think it would be compatible.
John S
PDX OR
After inheriting the farm… I removed a well established quince because, after several attempts, I couldn’t figure out what to do with all of them 
I regret that decision.
In my grafting experiences I’d learned that pears were often grafted onto quince rootstock; suspecting the reverse would work, I tried it. I grafted a “Pineapple quince†onto a well established Bartlett pear tree. It worked, but like most ‘bark grafts’ on the understory, it didn’t receive enough light to flourish – and I didn’t want to hack off any portion of the pear tree to get light to the quince graft. But they grew well … not knowing what to do with the lengthening quince shoot, I grafted it back into the pear, to ‘secure’ a week fork. It lasted until I accidentally stepped on it while pruning the pear ... though it never received enough sunlight to set fruit.
Anyway, you might consider grafting some quince to a pear, while the pear’s young. And, if you guys come up with a great suggestion for a fresh eating quince - I may attach it to a couple pear trees, Comice and D’Anjou, whose fruit often go to waste 
I typically root mine about now. I cut a slice in each side to help the roots come out. Our soil tends to be clay around here. I wonder if that's a factor. They just seem to leaf out when Spring comes. If you want to, we could switch some aromatnaya for some Crimea. It may be that some cultivars will easily root and others won't.
John S
PDX OR
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I took cuttings from a friends pineapple quince a few years ago to graft my own tree onto a quince rootstock.
I stored the scions for a couple of months or more in a ziplock bag wrapped in a moist paper towel in a small fridge. When I took them out the scions were covered with little white root initial bumps. I'm sure they would have rooted in a heartbeat.
I wonder if there are any good contacts in Western WA, near Tacoma for quince cuttings? Had one tree for years, but though it had gigantic quinces, it set very poorly. I suspect it was virus infected. Too bad cause the quinces were fairly tasty ---- when dead ripe and if eaten slowly.
Jade- Iran and Turkey are the countries that eat the most quince. They usually eat it cooked with meat. I assume, therefore, that most of their quinces are not the fresh eating types. In countries with limited refrigeration, one could understand how there would be a preference for fruit that could preserve itself without refrigeration for months. Cooking quince is better at that, so I assume you're right.
My Crimea oversets every year. It is a fresh-eating one. It is just incredible that such a small tree could put out so much fruit! It doesn't go biennial either, it just keeps setting huge groups of fruit.
I would (and do) put out cuttings now.
John S
PDX OR
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