You store apples and pears without refrigeration in a dark, cool, well-ventilated space with a stable temperature: apples do best at around 4 to 5 degrees, pears at around 0 to 1 degree, with a high humidity of roughly 80 to 90 percent. Do that and a proper keeper such as Belle de Boskoop, Winston or Jonagold will last you into February or March, and cooking pears like Saint Remy well into the winter. Four things decide whether it works: the variety (you do not store summer apples, full stop), the picking moment (ready to pick is not the same as ready to eat), the spot (cool, dark, damp, frost-free) and a weekly check, because one rotten apple takes the whole crate with it.
Hey there, fellow DIYer,
You have an apple tree. And every year the same thing happens: three weeks of apple sauce, apple pie, apples for the neighbours, apples at work, and then still half a wheelbarrow onto the compost heap.
What a waste. Because until a couple of generations ago people were eating their own apples right through to March. No fridge, no freezer, no gas-controlled cold store. Just the cellar, some crates, and a window cracked open.
You can still do it. But there are a few hard rules attached, and if you skip one of them you end up in December with a crate of brown mush instead of a crate of apples.
I go through all of them below. Which varieties are suited to this and which absolutely are not, exactly how you tell when an apple is ready to pick (and why that is not the same as ready to eat), where the best spot in your house is, how to get that spot cool and damp enough, and what to do with the part of the harvest you cannot shift after all.
Here we go:
The four rules it all hangs on
Before we go deep, here is the whole thing in four sentences:
- Only store keeper varieties. A summer apple will not last, however cool you keep it.
- Pick at the right moment, with the stalk on, and handle the fruit like eggs. Every bruise is a starting point for rot.
- Cool, dark, damp, frost-free and ventilated. All five at once, or it does not work.
- Check every week and pull out anything that has started. Rot spreads by contact and through the air.
The rest of this article is that, worked out properly.
Rule 1: which varieties can you store?
This is the most important choice, and at the same time the only one you can no longer adjust once the tree is in the ground.
Roughly speaking there are three categories:
Summer apples (August). Discovery, James Grieve, White Transparent. Soft, juicy, lovely. And gone within two weeks. You do not store these. You eat them, cook them or give them away. Done.
Autumn apples (September). Elstar, Lobo, Notarisappel, Jonathan. These will make it to December or February if you put them away properly, but they are not built to get through the winter.
Winter apples (October). These are the real keepers. They are often hard and sour at picking and only come good after weeks or months. Belle de Boskoop (Goudreinet), Winston, Sterappel, Court-Pendu, Smeetse.
A handy table with picking time and how long each variety stays edible:
| Apple variety | Picking time | Edible until |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | August | September |
| James Grieve | August | October |
| Notarisappel | September | November |
| Elstar | September | December |
| Lobo | September | December |
| Lemoenappel | September | January |
| Jonathan | September | February |
| Bramley’s Seedling | September | March |
| Gloster | October | December |
| Drentse Bellefleur | October | December |
| Jonagold | October | February |
| Belle de Boskoop | October | February |
| Dubbele Bellefleur | October | February |
| Franse Bellefleur | October | February |
| Princesse Noble | October | February |
| Granny Smith | October/November | February |
| Court-Pendu | October | March |
| Koningszuur | October | March |
| Sterappel | October | March |
| Winston | October | April |
| Smeetse | October | May |
Source: overview of apple and pear varieties with picking and storage times
And for pears:
| Pear variety | Picking time | Edible until |
|---|---|---|
| Juttepeer | August | October |
| Bloedpeer | September | October |
| Conference | September | November |
| Doyenné du Comice | September | December |
| Avezaath Kapel | October | December |
| Wellemanpeer | October | December |
| Wijnpeer | October | January |
| Winterrietpeer | October | January |
| Le Curé | October | February |
| Saint Rémie | September | February |
| Saint Remy | October | March |
What stands out about those lists: the varieties you find in the supermarket are barely on them. That is no accident. Supermarket varieties have been selected for transport and for storage in gas-controlled cold stores with a modified oxygen atmosphere, not for storage in your cellar. The old varieties were selected for centuries on exactly that: they had to get through the winter without any technology.
So if you are planting a fruit tree and you want to store for a long time, choose an old winter variety. A Winston or a Sterappel does what a Gala never will.
One more useful rule of thumb: thick skin equals longer keeping. Apples with a tough skin such as Granny Smith hold out longer than thin-skinned varieties, which dry out faster and ripen faster. Source: Delicious Magazine
Rule 2: ready to pick is not ready to eat
This is the bit most people skim past, and it is exactly where the gain is.
Ready to pick means: the fruit is ready to leave the tree. The pips have matured, the starch has largely converted, the fruit can carry on by itself.
Ready to eat means: it tastes good.
With a summer apple those two coincide. With a winter apple they are months apart. A Belle de Boskoop you pick in October is hard and sour. That same apple is fantastic in January. And if you already like the taste of it in October, you picked too late and it will never make it to January.
With pears it is even more extreme. Winter pears and cooking pears do not ripen properly on the tree. Leave them hanging until they feel “ripe” and they are already mealy and brown inside. Pears have to be picked when they are ready to pick, and then ripened afterwards: in the cellar, or at room temperature just before you use them.
How to judge the picking moment
The tilt test. The simplest and the best. Take the fruit in your hand, lift it and tilt it 90 degrees upwards. Does the stalk come away from the branch on its own? Ready to pick. Do you have to pull or twist? Leave it hanging, come back in a week. Source: Tuinadvies
The pip test. Cut one apple through. Unripe fruit has white pips. As it ripens they slowly colour brown to brown-black. Dark brown pips equals ready to pick.
The ground colour. Do not look at the red flush (that mostly tells you about sunlight), look at the ground colour underneath. It goes from grass green to yellow-green or yellow.
The first windfalls. Suddenly finding sound fruit under the tree, with no wind and no worm damage? Then the tree has started by itself. Pick within a week or two.
A test that commercial growers use and that you should understand properly: the iodine or Lugol test. You spray an iodine solution onto a cut apple; the starch stains dark, the converted sugar stays white. From that pattern you read off how far ripening has come. Interesting to know, but for a garden with one tree the tilt test is plenty.
How to pick
- With the stalk on. An apple without a stalk has an open wound and will be the first to rot. Tilt, do not pull.
- Do not squeeze it in your palm. You only see bruises weeks later, as brown patches under the skin.
- Do not drop them into a bucket. A 20 cm drop onto a hard surface is already enough to bruise.
- Pick dry. Wet fruit in a crate is mould in a crate. Wait a day after rain.
- Pick in stages. The fruit on the sunny side and on the outside of the crown ripens earlier than the fruit inside. Two or three picking rounds a week apart gives you far better fruit for storing.
- Windfalls do not go in the crate. Ever. You use those up that same week.
- Do not wash them. The skin carries a natural waxy bloom that holds moisture in. You would wash that off. At most, polish with a dry cloth if there is soil on it.
Rule 3: the right spot: cool, dark, damp, frost-free, ventilated
Now the spot. And here is the immediate problem with modern houses: they are equally warm everywhere and equally dry everywhere. Precisely what you do not want.
The ideal values
| Apples | Pears | |
|---|---|---|
| Temperature | 4 to 5 °C | 0 to 1 °C |
| Humidity | high, towards 85-90% | around 80% |
| Light | dark | dark |
| Air | ventilated, no draught | ventilated |
Source: Tuinkrant and De Margaretha
Two things to take away from this:
First: pears want it colder than apples. If you only have one space, 2 to 4 degrees is a fine compromise that both can live with.
Second: stability matters more than the exact degree. A space that sits steadily at 8 degrees works better than one that swings between 1 and 12. Every temperature swing puts condensation on the fruit, and condensation gives you mould.
And the lower limit: keep the space above freezing. Fruit that has frozen and thawed again goes brown and soggy. If there is a hard frost outside, an old blanket or a layer of straw goes over the crates, or you move them further into the house for a while.
Where in the house?
An old, unheated cellar, the winner. Cool, stable, often damp all by itself. Ideally with an air vent or a small window on the north side that you can open to air it out. If your cellar holds the boiler or the tumble dryer, it is no longer a storage cellar but a heated room, and it is out.
An unheated utility room or a north-facing pantry. Works well for smaller quantities, provided the door to the warm house stays shut.
A brick shed or a garage. Fine in November and December. Risky in January, because a free-standing shed can freeze. Put a min/max thermometer in there before you put 40 kilos of apples in it.
The crawl space. Often exactly right for temperature and humidity. Downside: mice, and you have to get down on your knees every time. Only do it if it is easy to get into and dry (not wet).
What does not work:
- The loft. Too warm in late summer, too dry all year, and in winter often too cold instead. Apples in the loft shrivel.
- A wooden garden shed. Too much temperature swing and it freezes in there in January.
- The kitchen cupboard. Room temperature means one to two weeks of keeping, and that is that.
- A plastic bag or a sealed box. No air, condensation on the inside, mould within ten days.
Too dry? Here is how to get the humidity up
In modern, insulated spaces this is often the real sticking point. Too dry and the apples start to wrinkle.
- Wet the floor now and then. The classic method and surprisingly effective in a cellar with a concrete or sand floor.
- Put down a few buckets or trays of water. A large surface works better than a deep bucket.
- Set pears in damp sand. This is an old method that works well: a layer of lightly damp sand in a crate, the fruit set into it, not touching each other. The sand keeps the humidity around the fruit constant.
- Wrap the fruit loosely in newspaper or tissue paper. That slows drying out and keeps the fruit apart, so rot does not spread. Downside: you can no longer see what is going on, so you have to unwrap them when you check.
- Hang up a hygrometer. Costs little and takes the guesswork out.
Too damp is also possible, and you notice it from condensation on the fruit and a musty smell. Then you need more ventilation: open an air vent, or leave the door ajar for a few hours a day.
Rule 4: how to lay the fruit out
In shallow wooden crates or wicker baskets. Wood breathes, plastic does not. The wooden crates greengrocers use are perfect.
One layer, two at most. Fruit stacked three layers deep gets bruised at the bottom and you cannot see what is happening. Better more crates than thicker layers.
Stalk upwards and do not let the fruit touch. If they do touch, rot passes straight across. Newspaper in between solves that.
Put the crates on a rack, not on the floor. Keep 10 to 15 cm clear under the bottom crate so air can pass underneath. On a cold concrete floor you also get condensation.
Sort by size. Set the biggest fruit aside, because it keeps less well than the medium-sized fruit. Eat those first.
Sort by variety and keep the varieties separate. Do not mix a short keeper in among your long keepers. Ripening fruit gives off ethylene, a gaseous ripening hormone, and that speeds up the ripening of everything next to it. One box of Elstar in the same room as your Winstons costs you weeks of keeping time.
For the same reason: do not put apples with your vegetables. Ethylene turns carrots bitter and speeds up spoilage in a lot of leafy vegetables. Fruit separate, vegetables separate.
Sound fruit only. No worm damage, no brown patch, no damaged skin, no missing stalk. Anything with a blemish goes on the “eat first” pile or the cooking pile.
Rule 5: a quick look every week
Set a recurring reminder for it. Once a week, five minutes.
What to look for:
- Brown, soft patches. Often brown rot (Monilinia), recognisable by concentric rings of pale mould dots. Straight out, and check the neighbours beside it too.
- Blue-green mould patches. Penicillium, usually started at some damage. Out.
- Wrinkling skins. Too dry. Get the humidity up.
- Condensation on the fruit. Too damp, or too much temperature swing. More ventilation.
- Brown specks in the flesh (bitter pit). A calcium deficiency that already developed on the tree, not in the cellar. These fruits stay edible but store badly. Eat them first.
- Mouse damage and droppings. Mice can smell fruit a kilometre off. Crates with lids, or a fine mesh around them.
And the golden rule: anything starting to rot goes out immediately. Not tomorrow. Not “that side is still fine”. Gone. One rotten apple in a crate is five rotten apples within two weeks.
No cellar? The earth clamp
If you have no cool space at all, there is still an old method that works surprisingly well: a fruit clamp in the garden.
Here is how you do it:
- Dig a pit about 40 to 50 cm deep in a spot with good drainage (so not somewhere water stands).
- Put a layer of straw or dry leaves in it.
- Set a wooden crate or a lidded bucket with your fruit into it, or lay the fruit straight onto the straw.
- Cover with a thick layer of straw or leaves, and the excavated soil on top of that.
- Make sure there is a small vent (a twist of straw or a short tube), so it does not start to heat up.
- Mark the spot and reckon on mice: fine mesh all round is not an unnecessary luxury.
The soil holds the temperature steady at around five to ten degrees and keeps the humidity high by itself. Downside: you cannot get at it without digging, so this is a method for a large stock that you open in one go, not for this afternoon’s apple.
The rest of the harvest: what to do with it
Realistically you only store part of it. For the rest:
Apple sauce. The classic. Cook it down and freeze it, or bottle it in preserving jars. Takes up little room and lasts a year.
Juice. You can press your own with a small fruit press, but for bigger quantities a mobile pressing service is more interesting. They press and pasteurise for you, and the juice then keeps for about a year. Do note: such services usually work with a minimum quantity, often in the order of 120 to 150 kilos per run. Teaming up with the neighbours or the whole street is often the answer.
Drying. Slices of 3 to 5 mm, in a dehydrator or in the oven on its lowest setting with the door ajar. Dried apple rings take up almost no room and keep for months in a well-sealed jar.
Bottling cooking pears. Gieser Wildeman and Saint Remy, stewed and put into preserving jars: the simplest way to keep pears you do not eat raw well into the year.
Freezing. Raw apple slices go soggy, but that does not matter if you are going to turn them into pie or sauce anyway. Stewed pears freeze perfectly well.
Giving them away. Seriously, this is not a joke. A crate by the gate saying “free, help yourself” is empty within a day in most streets, and you have got three conversations with the neighbours out of it.
The eight mistakes that cost you your stored harvest
1. Trying to store summer apples. A lost cause. First find out which variety you have.
2. Picking too late. An apple that is already ready to eat on the tree is lost as a keeper. Pick winter apples hard.
3. Picking without the stalk. Open wound, first to rot.
4. Storing windfalls. Every windfall apple has internal bruising, whether you can see it or not.
5. Washing before storing. You take off the natural waxy bloom and add moisture.
6. Plastic or sealed boxes. Condensation and mould guaranteed.
7. Varieties mixed together. Ethylene from the fast ripeners speeds everything up.
8. Not checking. The most expensive mistake of the lot, because it costs you not one apple but the whole crate.
What does this cost, and is it worth it?
The investment is small. A stack of wooden fruit crates from the market or from a grower often costs you a couple of euros each, or nothing at all. A simple rack of softwood battens costs you a tenner or so in timber. A min/max thermometer and a hygrometer together cost a reasonable amount and you will use them for years.
All together you are looking at a one-off outlay in the order of 25 to 75 euros, depending on how much racking you build. With that you can carry tens of kilos of fruit through the winter, year after year, that would otherwise have ended up on the compost heap.
And the real return is not even financial. It is eating an apple from your own garden in February.
Frequently asked questions
How long do apples keep without a fridge?
At room temperature you get about one to two weeks. In a cool, dark cellar at 2 to 5 degrees a good keeper lasts months: Jonagold and Belle de Boskoop until February, Winston until April, Smeetse even into May. What decides it is not the cooling but the combination of variety, picking moment and stability of the temperature. A summer apple like Discovery will not make it through the winter even in the best cellar.
What is the best temperature for storing apples and pears?
Apples do best at around 4 to 5 degrees, pears at 0 to 1 degree. If you only have one space, 2 to 4 degrees is a good compromise. More important than the exact figure is that the temperature stays stable: swings put condensation on the fruit and condensation gives you mould. Do keep the space above freezing, because fruit that has frozen and thawed again goes brown and soggy.
Can I store apples and pears together?
You can, but it is not ideal. Pears want it colder than apples, and both give off ethylene, the gas that speeds up ripening. If you have the room, keep them separate, or at the very least put them in separate crates with some distance between them. More important still: never mix a short keeper in among your long keepers, because the fast ripener drags the rest along with it. And do not put fruit with vegetables: ethylene turns carrots bitter and speeds up spoilage in leafy vegetables.
Should I wash apples before storing them?
No. The skin carries a natural waxy bloom that holds moisture in and protects the fruit. Wash that off and the apple dries out faster, and you also add moisture that mould is waiting for. If there is soil or dust on it, polish it off dry with a cloth. You wash an apple just before you eat it, not four months beforehand.
How do I know if my apples are ready to pick?
Do the tilt test: lift the apple and tilt it 90 degrees upwards. If the stalk comes away from the branch by itself, it is ready to pick. If you have to pull, leave it hanging another week. A second check is the pip test: cut one apple through and look at the pips. White means unripe, dark brown to brown-black means ready to pick. Also look at the ground colour under the flush: it goes from grass green to yellow-green.
Why do my stored apples go wrinkly?
Air that is too dry. The fruit loses moisture through the skin and shrivels. Bring the humidity up towards 85 to 90 percent by wetting the floor of the storage space now and then, putting out trays of water, or wrapping the fruit loosely in newspaper. A hygrometer for a few euros takes the guesswork out. Wrinkly apples are still perfectly edible, by the way, they just look less appealing and lose some of their crispness.
Can I ripen pears in the cellar?
Yes, and with winter pears that is the whole idea. Pears do not ripen well on the tree; leave them hanging and they go mealy and brown inside. Pick them when they are ready to pick and keep them cold. When you want to eat some, bring a few pears up and let them ripen at room temperature; depending on the variety that takes a few days to a good week. That way you eat fresh pears all winter instead of the whole harvest ripening at once.
What do I do if I have no cellar?
First see whether there is an unheated utility room, a north-facing pantry, a brick shed or an accessible dry crawl space. All four can work, provided it is dark, cool, damp and frost-free in there; put a min/max thermometer in place before you put kilos of fruit in it. If none of that works, an earth clamp in the garden is a proven alternative: a pit 40 to 50 cm deep, straw underneath and on top, soil over that and a small vent. The downside is that you cannot get at it daily, so it is a method for a stock that you open in one go.
You often build a good storage spot yourself: a simple rack of softwood battens in the cellar, a ventilated cupboard in the utility room, or a frost-free storage shed that is genuinely tight and dry. At Fred’s DIY Plans you will find complete working drawings with dimensions and a materials list for exactly that kind of garden and storage project, so you build it right once instead of adjusting it three times.
Do yourself a favour. Put that weekly check in your diary and keep it up until March. Five minutes a week is the difference between a cellar full of apples and a cellar full of regret.
Cheers, Fred Schouten, handyman and DIYer through and through.
PS: write the variety and the picking date on every crate, with a marker on a piece of tape. In January you genuinely will not remember which stack was the Winstons and which the Jonagolds, and then you eat the wrong ones first.