How to Harvest, And Store, Fall-Ripening Fruit

As we continue into late summer and fall, we are in the prime season for fall-ripening tree fruit like apples, European pear, Asian pear, pawpaw, persimmon, and jujube. The trick is knowing when to harvest and then how to store these fruits.

First, when do you harvest them? Look up when the cultivar you are working with is usually ready. The ripening time can vary widely depending on the cultivar, so you really want to look up the specific one/s you have. For example, there are apple cultivars that ripen in July in St. Louis and also ones that ripen in late October-November and every week in between. So just looking up when “apples” are ripe won’t help much. Knowing when, roughly, they will be ready makes the process of figuring out when to pick much easier. This is because the real way to tell if a fruit is ripe is if it comes off the tree easily. For example, if you lift an apple up so it’s hanging sideways, bending the stem, but not pulling it, the stem will pop right off the branch if it’s fully ripe. If you have to pull the apple to harvest it, it’s not fully ripe yet. The same happens with pawpaw, jujube, and persimmon, which have short or no stems. When you lift them and move them a little, they pop right off if they are ripe. Another way you often see people testing this is gently shaking the tree. The ripe ones fall off. However, doing this can often damage the fruit upon impact with the ground, shortening their storage life. This is also a bad idea for soft fruit like pawpaw, which will get severely bruised by doing this. It’s uncommon for all fruit to ripen at the exact same time on the same tree. So go through and pick all that is ripe, then come back and repeat in a few days. Repeat this process until you’ve harvested all of the fruit.  

Once the fruit is picked, you will then want to store it. Any fruit that has damage like bug holes, bruises, brown spots, etc. should be eaten, cooked, canned, frozen, or preserved in some other way. These fruits will start rotting first and have the shortest shelf life. For those that are undamaged, you can hope for a longer shelf life.  

Pawpaws don’t store long even in the best of circumstances, so they should be eaten or frozen as soon as possible because even in the refrigerator they are only good a week or so. Special note: do not dry pawpaw for preservation. Persimmons can be refrigerated, but like pawpaws, do not stay good for very long in their fresh form.

Jujube can store for a long time, but they mostly will dehydrate themselves if they aren’t eaten in the first few weeks. Dried, they make a decent replacement for dates.

Apples, European pears, and Asian pears are the classically great storing fruit. As a general rule, the later the ripening cultivar, the longer it stores. For example, the apples that ripen in July usually only last a few days or a week, while the ones that ripen in late October-November can store for months or even a year in ideal storage situations. These fruits are best stored in the refrigerator in the crisper drawer or in a loose-fitting container. It is vital that you regularly check on them because once one starts going bad, the rot can spread to the others. So check regularly on them and remove any that are starting to go bad.