Orchards

The cider orchard year

What happens in a cider orchard through the year?

In short

The orchard year runs from dormancy in midwinter through bud burst and blossom in spring, fruit set and June drop in early summer, cell expansion and then ripening through the summer, harvest in autumn, and leaf fall back into dormancy. The tree is doing something in all of it, including the winter, when next year’s flower buds are already formed and waiting.

For a cider maker the useful way to read the calendar is backwards: nearly everything about the juice — how much sugar, how much acid, how sound the fruit is — was determined months before the press ran.

The five harvest windows CiderHQ uses, as they fall in the English West Country. A window is a ripening period for a population of trees in one climate, not a date.

Described in full

Where these months apply: Southern and western England — Somerset, Devon, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire — which is the geography the five window names were coined in and the one almost every English harvest date on this site was recorded in. They are not universal. The same cultivar ripens on different dates in Normandy, in Asturias and in the Skagit Valley, and this chart should not be read against a harvest anywhere else without adjusting for it.
The axis: August to December, left to right, with month divisions marked. Each of the five harvest windows the site uses is drawn as a bar spanning the period it covers.
Very early: Late August into early September. Early sharps and early dessert fruit. Useful for starting a mill before the main crop, and rarely capable of a balanced cider alone.
Early: September. Early bittersweets, and the point at which a mill can begin pressing in earnest.
Mid: Late September to mid October. The main crop, and most of the traditional bittersweets. The bulk of any West Country blend is picked in this window.
Late: Late October. Late bittersweets, ripening as leaf fall begins and the weather turns against gathering from grass.
Very late: November onwards. Perry pears and the latest vintage-quality apples. Fruit here is often picked hard and held to sweat, and a wet November can lose an entire late crop.
Why the windows overlap: They are ripening periods for populations of trees, not fixed dates. Season, site and rootstock move a given cultivar by two or three weeks in either direction, and the same fruit is early in Herefordshire and mid in a colder year.
Hemisphere: These are northern-hemisphere months. Tasmanian, New Zealand and South African harvests run through the equivalent southern months, roughly February to June.
What a cultivar page shows instead: A cultivar record carries the window it is placed in and, where a named programme recorded one, that programme’s own observation — the mean harvest date at WSU Mount Vernon, or the ripening band the National Perry Pear Collection records at Hartpury. Those are site observations and they sometimes disagree with the window; both are kept rather than one overwriting the other, because the disagreement is a fact about where the fruit was grown.

The calendar

The table below describes a northern-hemisphere maritime cider region — the English West Country, the Three Counties, Normandy. Timings shift with latitude, altitude and season, and everything advances by a week or more in a warm spring. In the southern hemisphere the same sequence runs six months displaced.

Read it as a sequence rather than as a set of dates. What the tree does next depends on what it has already accumulated — chilling through the winter, then warmth through the spring — so a cold March pushes everything after it back, and a warm one draws it all forward together. The intervals between stages are far more reliable than the calendar positions of the stages themselves.

The orchard year in a northern maritime cider region. Timings are indicative and move with the season.
Period	What the tree is doing	What the orchard needs	Why it matters for the cider
December–February	Dormant; accumulating winter chill; next season’s flower buds already formed	Pruning, planting, tree guards checked, scion wood cut	Pruning sets canopy density, which sets disease pressure and light interception
March	Dormancy breaking; buds swelling	Nutrition applied where needed; scab inoculum in leaf litter dealt with	Overwintered scab spores are released from the moment green tissue appears
April	Bud burst, green cluster, pink bud; perry pears in blossom	Frost watch; scab protection in a wet spring	A frost now costs the whole year’s crop
May	Apple blossom, mostly late for cider cultivars; pollination and fertilisation	Pollinators foraging; no spraying into open blossom	Seed number set here governs fruit size and retention
June	Fruit set consolidating; June drop; flower initiation for next year begins	Crop load assessed; grass managed	This is where biennial bearing is decided for the following season
July–August	Cell expansion; fruit sizing; starch accumulating	Summer disease control; water in a dry year	Fruit size and starch reserve set the eventual sugar
September	Early cultivars ripening; starch beginning to convert to sugar	Early harvest; sward mown short before the fall	Early varieties let a mill start pressing before the main crop
October	Main harvest; mid and late cultivars ripening and dropping	Shaking, gathering, sorting, milling promptly	Picking date sets sugar, acid and how much rot arrives at the mill
November	Very late cultivars finishing; leaf fall	Late harvest; leaf litter management; canker inspection	Canker infects through fresh leaf scars at leaf fall

Two years at once

The most counter-intuitive feature of the orchard year is that the tree is always working on two crops. The flower buds that will open next April are initiated in early summer of the year before, while the current crop is still on the tree. This overlap is the mechanism behind biennial bearing: a heavy crop suppresses the initiation of next year’s flower buds, so a heavy year is followed by a light one.

It also means that decisions have delayed consequences. Pruning in winter affects both this year’s crop and next year’s flower initiation. A frost that removes this year’s crop leaves the tree free to initiate flower buds abundantly, so a frost year is often followed by a heavy one. The orchard has a memory a season deep, and most of what looks like erratic behaviour is the previous year expressing itself.

Where the calendar meets the cellar

The pressing season is short and it is defined by the orchard rather than by the mill. Early cultivars let a press start in September; the bulk of the crop arrives in October; very late cultivars can extend milling into November and, in some traditions, fruit is deliberately held to sweat before pressing. A blend built from cultivars ripening across that whole span is a logistical arrangement as much as a recipe.

The season also sets fermentation temperature without anyone choosing it. Juice pressed in October in an unheated building ferments cool and slow, which favours a long ferment with more aromatic retention. Juice pressed in an unusually warm early autumn ferments faster and hotter, with different results. In a traditional operation the orchard year and the cellar year are one continuous process, and the weather governs both ends of it.

Also answered on this page

Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

When do cider apples blossom?
When are cider apples harvested?
What is done in an orchard in winter?

Places

What people ask next

Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.

How do you know when cider apples are ready to pick
How should a cider tree be pruned
What happens inside a cider apple as it ripens
When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
Why does my apple tree only crop every other year — Because a heavy crop suppresses the flower buds that would have made next year’s crop, and the light year that follows suppresses nothing — so the alternation sustains itself. Thinning early, while next year’s buds are still being set, is what interrupts it; thinning late removes fruit and nothing else.
What is june drop

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset
Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.
NIAB (incorporating East Malling Research)
NIAB · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
East Malling developed the M-series apple rootstocks that determine tree size in essentially every modern orchard, cider orchards included. The authority CiderHQ uses for rootstock behaviour.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.

Where to go next

Cider orchards — The rest of the orchard material, grouped by what you want to know.
Cider apples — The cultivars themselves, with vigour, pollination group and harvest window.
How cider is made — What happens to the fruit once it leaves the orchard.