Long Keeping Apples

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Frequently Asked Questions

A Long Keeping apple is defined (by this website) as an apple variety which will stay on the tree into the winter months or which will keep well under cool but non-refrigerated conditions well into the spring.
No definitely not. This site is very much just documentation of a work in progress and the information is not definitive. Any use you make of the information provided here is at your own risk.

It is important to realize that apples varieties behave differently in different climates. Too hot - some varieties will not produce, late frost - no apples that year, not long enough of a growing season - some varieties do not properly ripen. Some apple varieties are biennial bearing which means they will only produce apples every second year. Usually, in such cases, you get a bumper crop one year and a dearth the next. Apples also need a suitable pollination partner as most are not self fertile.

In addition, apples are susceptible to a variety of diseases. Anecdotally, heirloom and Long Keeping apples seem to suffer less from things like canker but there is no guarantee that is is true for every variety listed here.

As information becomes available more details on the growing conditions and other details for each variety will be added to this website.
One of the main benefits of Long Keeping apples is that they extend the harvest season. For example, if you have three normal apple trees then all of the apples are typically available at the same time in August or September. For commercial growers this is desirable since it makes it possible to have all of the apples picked and shipped at once and then move on to other things.

For small growers being inundated with apples for a month and then having nothing is less useful. True, you can store them - but that takes effort and resources. One can make the case that it is be better to have a continuous supply of fresh apples stored on the tree for months at a time until you are ready to pick them. If your three trees consisted of one early apple, one normal apple and one Long Keeping apple you could have fresh apples from July all the way through to February or maybe March.

So, to answer the question, it all depends on what your definition of "better" is. If you are a consumer and like having apples available during the winter and spring that did not need to be refrigerated for months, soaked in chemicals, bathed in various preservation gasses and transported thousands of miles then Long Keeping apple varieties might have value to you. If you are a small scale grower and feel that the ability to deliver out of season apples for which you did not have to absorb storage costs or which you could pick at a more convenient time then Long Keeping apple varieties might have value in that scenario as well.

If your main desire is to have good tasting apples available and you are not too bothered about what time they appear, then the Long Keeping aspect of certain apple varieties is probably of minimal benefit. There are lots of good apple varieties out there to choose from.
Better in many cases. The Heirloom varieties are usually excellent apples - meeting or exceeding any of the "store bought" apples in taste and quality. Remember, heirloom apples have been well and truely filtered by time. If they were not good apples they would not have been thought worthy of propagation and hence would have disappeared by now. However, it is possible that they will not be as attractive in appearance or shape as the commercial apples. There was a lot less emphasis on that sort of thing in the past.

To be realistic, even for heirloom apples, there are lots of other traits which might have been selected for over time. For example, if a particular apple is extremely productive in a particular climate it may well have been retained because of that trait. On the other hand, just about every apple you purchase in a shop will definitely have been selected for ability to ship without bruising and for cosmetic characteristics such as shape, colour and size. They will also have probably been picked earlier than is optimal and will have been stored for some considerable time. Usually, the taste does not have to be any better than "good enough" as long as other commercially desirable features are present.

Foundling apples are a slightly different story. Foundlings are apples discovered growing from random discards. They are tasty (the poor tasting or bland ones are not collected) and but their primary trait of value is extreme robustness. Usually they are slightly smaller in size than the apples you might see commercially available. If you don't mind that then they are perfectly good, interesting, apples.

Foundling apples are primarily kept by the author as breeding stock to provide the ability to cross in extreme robustness and vigour into an existing heirloom line.
A Heirloom apple is an old apple cultivar usually isolated to a region or grown by a specific group of people. Each variety was propagated because it had traits that the people using it considered valuable.

Historically, there were many thousands of such varieties and they were passed on from generation to generation as a valuable inheritance. Sadly, most have now been lost. However, in many areas there are now groups dedicated to the preservation of local heirloom varieties.
If you look in the shops you will probably find about six or eight different varieties and every shop will have those same six or eight types of apple. These are not necessarily poor quality apples but they are selected for many traits other than for taste. For example, they have to ship well, they have to be visually attractive and of a sufficient size. Out of season, commercial apples will have been stored under refrigeration and of course many chemicals will have been applied. Taste is important in a commercial apple - but it is not the most important thing.

If you grow an heirloom apple you will have access to an apple variety that is simply not available in the shops and you will know exactly what (if any) chemicals have been applied to it. Heirloom apples are becoming increasingly available in specialist nurserys and are well worth considering.
To be honest, these days, the most common source for Foundling Apples is beside busy roads on the outskirts of metropolitan centres. People eat apples in their vehicles and then toss the cores onto the side of the road where occasionally an apple seed might germinate. Sometimes Foundling Apples can be observed a short distance away from an established tree of a known variety where birds or animals have dropped the apple core while eating them. Usually this is along the line of a fence or a hedge.
Foundling apples are interesting because of their incredible robustness. Since Foundlings are (by definition) discoveries of apple varieties growing from random apple core discards, they have been through a seriously harsh selection process just to get to the point where a human might notice them.

Think about it. Every year millions of apple cores are tossed onto the side of roads - even people who would never dream of throwing rubbish out a car window are tempted to discard the remnants of an apple they have just eaten. Of those millions of seeds deposited at the side of the road, a miniscule number will sprout and take root to produce a seedling tree. A far fewer quantity of those seedlings will be able to survive and out compete the grasses to reach a size where they can produce apples. Of the apple producing trees, a far smaller number will actually retain apples on the tree at a date where a human might notice them and consider them to be Long Keeping. A yet smaller proportion of those will actually have an interesting taste since many are little better than large crab apples.

The odds of a discarded apple seed reaching the point where it is an interesting Long Keeping foundling are nearly zero - yet they do exist. Any such tree has been through an extreme Darwinian winnowing process and they usually have a vitality uncommon in other apples. Nobody cared even the slightest about it during its entire life - yet somehow that tree took on the weeds at the side of a road, won, and made it to a point where it produces worthwhile apples. Such vigour in a apple variety with Long Keeping traits is extremely valuable in its own right and even more so as breeding stock.
Not really, you can never really know the definitive parentage of a Foundling Apple. In practice, however, given that most Foundlings are germinations from discarded apple cores and that the people eating them will only very rarely be eating anything other than a supermarket apple and since there are only a limited number of varieties in supermarkets you can often have a pretty good guess as to the likely parent.

Going by colour and taste, Golden Delicious seems a likely ancestor of a rather large number of Foundlings. This is reasonable seeing as how common a variety it is.
Unfortunately not. Some (very few) varieties listed on this site are protected by a type of UK and EU intellectual property right known as Plant Variety Rights (PVR). This prohibits any person from propagating or selling the plant without permission - kind of like a plant patent. Such plants are usually available for purchase commercially. A tag on the detail page for the variety indicates if the plant is currently known to be protected under a PVR.

Please note that this website is not an authoritative source for apple PVR information. It is entirely possible that PVR tags may be omitted in error. It is entirely your responsibility to check the PVR status of an apple variety before using it in a breeding program.

An example of a PVR protected variety is Christmas Pippin.
Every apple we have today was propagated by some group of people that thought a particular variety had useful features that the other apple varieties available to them did not. The are lots of features which may be desirable such as: large size, disease resistance, great taste or productivity in certain climatic conditions (there are many more).

The ability to keep for a long time is just one such feature - the opposite would be those apple varieties that ripen very early. Either way, the effect is to expand the date of harvest so that apples are available at times of the year when they would not otherwise normally be.

The reason for choosing long keeping as a theme is simply because it is interesting to do so and there is relatively little collected information available in this area.
One day in mid winter, I was driving through the the city of Worcester in the UK and noticed and apple tree growing in the bushes at the side of a roundabout. It was a scraggly little thing about 6 foot (2 meters) tall and was covered in yellow apples.

At the time I had a few apple trees, of common commercially available types, and was considering in a vague sort of way getting into apple tree breeding as a hobby. I was truely impressed by the strength and spirit of this little foundling tree and thought a scion (cutting) should be collected in order to preserve it. This, as it turned out, was wise as the tree was cleared out in some periodic brush cutting by the local road crews a year or so later.

It never occurred to me that apples could stay on the tree in perfect condition that late in the season. This sparked my interest and since I wanted to collect and breed apples I decided to focus on Long Keeping varieties.

BTW: This apple is listed on this website as Worcester Round - you can probably guess the origin of the name.
Well, there is a problem with that. The original intention of this website was to set it up as a sort of hobby level commercial business which sold Long Keeping apple varieties to interested people. However, as of December 2019, all plants (and plant material) sold in the UK must now have a plant passport. This is a bit of record keeping that, on the face of it, is not such a bad idea. If the people providing plants retain information regarding to whom the material was sold then diseases can be traced back to the source and problems eliminated.

As usual, the devil is in the details and the implementation as it stands now (May 2020) is overly broad and restrictive. The upshot is that, unless this site obtains a plant passport it cannot legally sell plants, or parts of plants such as scions, over the counter, via mail order or the internet.

So, why not just get a plant passport then? Well, the problem is that in order to do so the site must be inspected and the charge is about £250 per hour and travel to and from the site is chargeable. Given the remoteness of this sites physical location, the costs could seriously mount up. If it was just a one-off cost it would not be entirely out of the question - but it is not - the site must be inspected yearly. It was never the intention to turn a profit but the plant passporting expense renders the "sell to cover the costs" model completely uneconomic.

It is entirely possible that the government will recognise the impact the plant passport costs are having on the small specialty grower and let sites raising plants in the UK and selling entirely in the UK self-certify for a plant passport. If that should happen, this site will begin to sell Long Keeping Apple trees directly.
Some Long Keeping Apples such as Granny Smith, Christmas Pippin, Lady Williams and Braeburn are all commercially available. A web search on the variety name may turn up other sites that sell that apple tree.

Hopefully over the next few years we will be able to make contact with commercial growers who would be willing to sell the Long Keeping Apple varieties listed on this website. If, and when, this happens a link to the suppliers will be posted on the About page.

Lady Williams! Taste is a very subjective thing - but this apple would be considered excellent by most people. It is the female parent of Cripps Pink (a.k.a the Pink Lady™ apples sold in the supermarket) and tastes similar. IMHO Lady Williams is the far better apple. It is very long keeping, productive, attractive and is a really fine apple.

The downside is that, reputedly, Lady Williams will not reliably produce fruit in the UK due to the requirements for a longer growing season. Sadly, things are warming up and the summers are longer so this does not appear to be a problem in the south of the UK these days. This apple might not do well further north.

BTW: keeping only one apple variety is not a good idea. Most apples are not self-fertile and you will find that they will not set fruit if there is not another apple variety to pollenate them. If your neighbours do not have apples just get a crab apple and put it somewhere nearby. The crab apple will readily pollinate your apple tree and it will not affect the taste at all.
Spartan Sport. Spartan is readily commercially available and is a tasty and quite late apple. The apple in the main image was sold commercially as Spartan but appears to be a sport since the color is not quite right. It may well just be a mis-labeling by the supplier - without genetic testing it is impossible to be sure.

The image on the main page of this website was taken in early December 2019. As you can see, the leaves are long gone - but the apples are still available.
In the early days, the only camera available was a rather midrange (at best) cellphone camera and the images were taken of entire trees or branches. In order to get the image to a reasonable size on the screen, the image had to be magnified more than is desirable. A better camera is now in use and, as the breeding program progresses, better images should become available.

The major purpose of the apple images was to document the fact that the apple was late and to record its general characteristics. This is why some of the pictures are of dropped apples rather than apples still on the tree. The thinking was that if it's February and the apples are intact on the ground then they probably dropped in January. January is still a pretty good date for a late apple.
The text "IsCrab", when present on the detail page decribing an apple, means that the apple variety is a crab apple. Although they are not the main focus of this website, crab apples are sometimes listed if they are particularly long keeping.
The text "IsPVR", when present on the detail page decribing an apple, means that the apple variety is known to be a protected under Plant Variety Rights (PVR) and cannot be reproduced or bred from without permission from the owner. A PVR is a time limited legal construct similar to a patent. See the FAQ section on PVR for more information.

Please note that this website is not an authoritative source for apple PVR information. It is entirely possible that PVR tags may be omitted in error. It is entirely your responsibility to check the PVR status of an apple variety before using it in a breeding program.

An example of a PVR protected variety is Christmas Pippin.
As well as acting as a continuously updated repository of information regarding Long Keeping Apples, the next step will be to breed new varieties. The thinking is that it might be possible to create a worthwhile new apple by crossing in the existing heirloom varieties with the foundlings and thus produce an apple which is very Long Keeping, extremely robust and has excellent taste. Breeding apples is the work of decades and is, to put it bluntly, a pretty interesting way to run out the clock.
The Other page and its entries are really just a simple cost saving exercise. I am interested in many different topics and wanted to have a place to write up my results. Rather than undergoing the expense of purchasing a new domain name and creating a separate website I just added a page to this one. Maybe at some future date I will split them out into a separate website.