Plan a harvest that lasts three months, not three weeks

Plant for a spread of ripening dates, not a pile. In Missoula, 14 varieties we've picked and dated off our own trees run without a gap from Juliet cherries starting July 19 to Spartan apples finishing October 12. Our ripening map moves those dates to your town and shows which varieties will finish before your first hard freeze.

A spread beats a pile

Twelve apple trees that all come ripe the same week is twelve bushels in one weekend and nothing in September. Bob Purvis gives the same advice in his homeowner lectures: choose varieties that ripen at different times, not all at once. In east-central Minnesota his harvest ran from sweet cherries in mid-June to apples in mid-October, with apricots through July and plums from August 1 to September 30. He adds a practical one. If you always take a vacation the same weeks each summer, plant varieties that won't be ripe then.

It doesn't take a big orchard. An early apple for August, one for September and a keeper for October is three trees and three months of apples. Add a cherry, an apricot, a plum and a pear, and the season starts in July.

A Missoula calendar from July to October

These 14 varieties cover July 19 to October 12 in Missoula without a gap. All are green-dot varieties on the map, picked and dated by us, and real years swing about a week either way.

Plan around your first hard freeze

A freeze ends the harvest, and its date moves a lot from year to year. Our map lets you choose which freeze counts: a light freeze (28F for 2 hours), a hard freeze (26F for 4 hours) or a killing freeze (24F for 4 hours). The dates come from NOAA daily station records for 1991 to 2020, with the hours below each threshold estimated by the Linvill hourly model, from the long-record station nearest you. We use a real station instead of a smoothed weather grid because cold air pools in valley bottoms overnight, which is exactly where freezes bite.

At the Missoula airport station, the first hard freeze usually lands around October 24. In an early year (1 in 10) it comes by October 4, and in a late year (9 in 10) not until November 7. Everything in the calendar through Macoun is done before even an early-year hard freeze, and Haralson and Spartan finish before the average one.

Late does not mean no

A variety that finishes after your average freeze is a gamble, not a guarantee. A warm fall gets you a crop. Plant it if you want to, with your eyes open.

Newtown Pippin shows how the gamble can pay. Its Missoula window runs October 16 to October 26, past the airport's average hard freeze. We picked ours on October 22 and ate them crisp in late February, after more than four months in cold storage. Purvis notes that sugar and acid keep apples from freezing at 32F, that they can take 20F on the tree for a short spell, and that apples high in sugar and acid have taken 13F. A frozen apple is fine to eat, but it won't store.

The tree is the bigger worry in the coldest places. Purvis finds early ripeners usually survive better there, because they get more time after harvest to harden off. At Gallatin Gateway, where Ed Schultz sees -47F, University of Minnesota apples that were slow to shut down died by the pile in the early fall freezes of 2019 and 2020. The same varieties did fine in most of western Montana.

Reading the map for your town

The map moves every Missoula date to your place. It gives each place a heat anchor, the day its normal season builds up 16,000 growing degree hours, worked out for your coordinates from ten years of daily PRISM weather. Stone fruit shifts 0.8 days for every day of difference from Missoula. Apples and pears shift 0.3 days in warmer places and a full day in cooler ones. Tested against 122 dated harvests at 25 stations, it lands within a week 56% of the time and within two weeks 83%.

1. Type your town, address or ZIP, and pick which freeze ends your season.
2. Read the verdict line: your usual first freeze, the early and late years, and how far ahead of or behind Missoula your fruit ripens.
3. Check each bar: done before the earliest freeze, before the average freeze, or after it.
4. Find the red in the half-month strip. Nothing is ripe there, so that's where your next tree goes.
5. Weigh the confidence. Of the dates behind the whole catalog, 50 are high, 137 medium and 188 low, and a low one came from the type, a parent or thin sources, so treat it as a placeholder.

Pick at the right time

Ripe fruit comes off easily, and that's the first test for everything. Purvis's rule is to lift the fruit up and off rather than pulling it down. On apples, the background color under the red goes from grass green when unripe to whitish when ripe and yellowish when overripe, and a ripe apple has dark seeds. Plums separate easily from the stem, and apricots come away easily once they're soft and juicy.

Pears are the exception. Pick them when they separate easily from the spur, even while green, and ripen them indoors in a paper bag. Pears ripen from the inside out, and Purvis warns that a pear gone yellow on the tree is probably starting to rot at the core.

When you pick also sets how long apples keep. On our Kerr applecrabs, our rough estimate is that every day you wait within the two-week picking window costs about a week of storage life. Dearborn's Unknown keeps three weeks to a month if you pick it a week early.

Store it cold

Cold storage is what stretches an October harvest into winter. Purvis stores apples and pears loose in containers with open sides, like wooden boxes or plastic milk crates, at about 30 to 32F. Honeycrisp is the exception: University of Maine Extension keeps it at 36 to 38F because it chill-injures below 36F. Cardboard is fine for a short stretch, but it traps moisture and ethylene and the fruit molds, and only sound fruit should go into storage. Stone fruit goes in open-topped shallow boxes no more than 2 to 3 inches deep, at around freezing, and he suggests drying apricots and plums while they're still in prime shape.

The keepers carry the season. Wealthy and Haralson both store well, Zestar held over two months in our fridge without going mealy, and Newtown Pippin was still crisp after four.

Related guides

• Apple pollination in cold climates
• How we rate cold hardiness, and how to read our zone ratings
• What to do when your bare-root trees arrive

Where this comes from

• Our Ripening Map page and its data: a Missoula date for every variety we sell, 41 of them picked and dated off our own trees and the rest converted from published sources, with heat anchors from ten years of daily PRISM weather and freeze dates from NOAA station records for 1991 to 2020, using the Linvill hourly model.
• Our product descriptions and harvest notes for the varieties named here, including our Newtown Pippin storage test and our Kerr, Dearborn's Unknown and Zestar notes.
• Observations from our grower network, including Ed Schultz at Gallatin Gateway, Montana.
• Bob Purvis, Fruit Growing for Homeowners lecture notes: spreading the harvest, signs of ripeness, how much cold apples take on the tree, and home storage for apples, pears and stone fruit.
• R. Moran, A Guide to Harvest and Storage of Tree Fruits, University of Maine Cooperative Extension (Bulletin 2032), for Honeycrisp storage.

Updated September 2026.