Elgin and Ceres

How apples came

The Elgin valley lies about 70 km south-east of Cape Town, beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains, with the town of Grabouw at its centre. It was once called Koffee Kraal, and takes its present name from the farm Glen Elgin, part of which was handed to the railways for a station¹.

Its orchards begin with Antonie Viljoen, a doctor and member of the Cape Parliament, who bought the farm Oak Valley at auction on 15 December 1898^1,2. In March 1899 he ordered his first fruit trees from H. E. V. Pickstone’s nursery at Groot Drakenstein^2,3. The family’s history of the farm records 100 Ben Davis trees paid for that July²; a history of the country’s early apples, built on Pickstone’s records, names Rhode Island Greening and Sturmer Pippin in the first order, and quotes Viljoen writing in March 1900 that the 1,700 trees he had received “proved satisfactory”³. According to South African History Online, his farm workers at first tended the trees largely on their own account, and theirs was the valley’s earliest known orchard of deciduous fruit¹; the family history dates Oak Valley’s first commercial orchard to 1900².

The railway arrived at Elgin from Sir Lowry’s Pass on 1 August 1902¹, and a road over the mountains to Vyeboom and Villiersdorp, named Viljoen’s Pass after the doctor who had pressed for both, followed in 1903². By 1910 Oak Valley had 8,000 trees, mostly apples and pears, and shipped its fruit to England under its own mark, “as much as 116½ tons” in a single season². In 1903 two Molteno brothers bought a plot called Glen Elgin and moved from vegetables into fruit, building a business that reached across the whole valley¹. Until modern cold stores came, the fruit could not be kept long enough to sell on a large scale; the industry grew fastest after the Second World War, with better cold storage and refrigerated ships, and Oak Valley was one of ten founders of the Elgin Fruit Packers Co-operative in 1948².

In the Ceres district, according to the centenary history of its growers’ co-operative, the first apple trees in the Koue Bokkeveld were planted in 1920, at Vaalbult and Elandsfontein, by P. M. Cillié and Piet Hugo. Twenty-one growers met on 2 September 1922 to found the co-operative, registered the following January; more than two thirds of its members spoke English, among them former British officers farming near Prince Alfred’s Hamlet. The railway reached Prince Alfred’s Hamlet in 1929, with lorries running on to the Koue Bokkeveld, whose only road to Ceres was the steep Gydo Pass, and the district’s first cold store opened in 1931⁴.

How they’re grown

Elgin is a cool upland basin ringed by mountains. Its vineyards lie between about 300 and 500 m and get 800 to 1,200 mm of rain a year, yet in 2019 the valley held more than 6,400 ha of apples and nearly 1,500 ha of pears against less than 750 ha of vines; a hectare of apples can give about 100 tonnes, a hectare of vines 5 to 15 tonnes of grapes⁵. The orchards have changed shape. Oak Valley’s plantings of the 1950s were widely spaced trees on seedling rootstocks; in the 1960s came close-planted orchards on Merton clonal rootstocks brought from East Malling, in the United Kingdom, and a modern orchard now gives about 70 to 80 tonnes of apples a hectare².

The Ceres district falls into three parts. The Warm Bokkeveld is a broad, fertile valley; Bo-Swaarmoed, east of the town, is cherry country; the Koue Bokkeveld to the north is a plateau of mountains, fruit and vegetables⁶. In a 2017 study, one farm in the Ceres valley stood at 504.31 m, below Ceres Peak, and two others at 984.11 m on the Koue Bokkeveld plateau and 1,059.71 m at Droëhoek; the Koue Bokkeveld farm was the coldest⁷. Rain falls in winter, from May to September, and snow about five times a year⁶. In the Bokkeveld, Granny Smith is planted mainly to pollinate other varieties⁹.

Apple trees need winter chill, and in Ceres it is waning. A 2021 study found that maximum temperatures there had warmed over 1981–2010, and projected under the RCP8.5 scenario that the chill units gathered each winter would fall by 2 to 5% by the 2020s, 7 to 17% by the 2050s and by 20 to 34% before the century’s end⁶. Hail is the other hazard: storms struck the Koue Bokkeveld on 8 February 2026, early in that year’s harvest¹⁰.

What’s picked

Hortgro’s 2025 tree census puts Ceres first among South Africa’s apple districts, with 7,780 ha. The district it calls Groenland, around Elgin and Grabouw¹², has 7,130 ha, and Villiersdorp/Vyeboom 4,657 ha: together about 77% of the country’s 25,385 ha of apples. South Africa picked 1,262,696 tonnes of apples in 2025, of which 619,435 tonnes were exported and 386,261 tonnes processed¹¹.

The national harvest runs from January to May, at its height from February to April, and controlled-atmosphere stores hold export fruit for up to nine months¹³. In 2026 the first Gala in the Ceres region was picked on 26 January, ten days earlier than the year before, and around Elgin the apples were seven to ten days ahead of normal¹⁰. Nationally, Gala led the 2025 census with 19% of the apple area, ahead of Golden Delicious (16%), Cripps Pink (14%), Granny Smith (12%) and Fuji (9%)¹¹; the green apples are giving way to Cripps Pink, Gala, Cripps Red and Fuji¹³. When world production outran demand in the 1990s, growers who stayed with Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and Red Delicious lost ground fast, and Oak Valley planted Gala, Braeburn, Fuji, Cripps Pink and Cripps Red².

The first export apples were older sorts. Elgin Orchards packed 12,550 cartons of Delicious, 11,838 of Ohenimuri and 6,336 of Cleopatra in 1939–40; Ohenimuri, from New Zealand, made up 28% of all South Africa’s apples in the 1950s; and in 1964 Rome Beauty, under 0.2% of Elgin’s apple area, filled more than 8% of Ceres’s³.

On the table

About 51% of South Africa’s apples are exported, to more than 95 countries; 29% are processed into juice and purées, and 20% are eaten fresh at home¹³. Ceres has pressed its fruit since the 1950s. Its first single-strength fruit juice was made in 1953 and a concentrate plant for lower-grade fruit followed in 1970⁴; after a heatwave in 2018, red apples that had grown to 500 g, too big for the fresh market, went to the juicing plant⁹. In Elgin, Edmond Lombardi created a drink of pure apple juice, with no additives or preservatives, on his Applethwaite farm and brought it to market in 1966¹. The valley’s fruit history is kept at the Elgin Apple Museum, opened in 1972 in an old cottage beside the Palmiet River¹⁵.

Notes

• Ceres takes its name from the Roman goddess of agriculture⁸.
• Viljoen and James Molteno, both members of the Cape Parliament, started the first campaign for the vote for women of all races, in 1907¹.
• From 1939 a Deciduous Fruit Board controlled the sale of apples and pears; single-channel marketing ended on 1 October 1997⁴.

Where the sources disagree

• How much Elgin grows. South African History Online (2011) and Wikipedia say the Elgin valley grows 60% of the national apple crop, and Wikipedia’s Grabouw article says 65% of apple exports^1,14,15. Hortgro’s 2025 census gives the Groenland district 28% of the national apple area, 46% with Villiersdorp/Vyeboom, and puts Ceres first with 31%¹¹; a 2021 study also calls Ceres the largest apple area⁶.
• Viljoen’s first trees. Both accounts date the first order to 1899, from Pickstone’s nursery; the family history names 100 Ben Davis trees², the history of early apples Rhode Island Greening and Sturmer Pippin³.
• What Groenland covers. Hortgro lists it apart from Villiersdorp/Vyeboom¹¹; a 2023 dissertation glosses it as Elgin, Grabouw, Villiersdorp and Vyeboom¹²; Wikipedia says the old name now belongs to the mountains north of Grabouw¹⁴.
• Elevation. No official altitude for Elgin’s orchards was found; the 300–500 m given is for the valley’s vineyards⁵. The Ceres figures are three farms in one study⁷.
• Harvest months are the national pattern¹³; no calendar for either district was found beyond the growers’ reports for 2026¹⁰.