The World of Apples

Growing regions

The Langkloof

A 160 km valley of apples and pears behind the Tsitsikamma coast

How apples came

South Africa’s apples are older than most of its towns. The first trees went into the Dutch East India Company’s garden at the Cape, and the first fruit was picked on 17 April 16627. The Langkloof came later. Cattle farmers were passing through the valley from the early 1700s, finding Khoi hunters and herders already settled there, and by taking twenty loan farms from the Company between 1760 and 1765 they occupied the whole kloof8. The valley had been named by Isaq Schrijver’s expedition in 16899.

Commercial orchards are a twentieth-century story. The Baldie family has farmed at Misgund since 1903, when the farm was established by their Scottish ancestor Alexander Baldie, “a pioneer within the fruit industry who planted the first commercial orchard of apple trees in the Langkloof with trees from Pickering Nursery in the Western Cape”4,5. The Cape government built the Avontuur Railway between 1890 and 1906 expressly to connect the Langkloof’s fruit with the new port at Port Elizabeth; at 285 km it remains the longest two-foot-gauge line in the world, climbing to 871 m at Avontuur10. Joubertina, now the valley’s largest town, was founded in 19079.

The valley kept apples of its own. Older growers remember the Kroontjie apples their parents brought to the school hostel in Joubertina, and a truly local variety, the Tjeek, that one farmer would show visitors behind his house in the 1950s. The oldest apple tree the authors of a South African apple history found anywhere in the country stands in the Baldie family’s garden at Misgund6.

How they’re grown

The Langkloof is a 160 km valley running east to west between two walls of the Cape Fold Belt: the Kareedouw, Langkloof and Tsitsikamma ranges on the south, the Kammanassie and Kouga on the north3,11. The name of the southern range explains the farming. Tsitsikamma is a Khoisan word meaning “place of much water”, and the mountains catch the moist air off the coast. North of the main road the valley is almost Karoo, with around 300 mm of rain a year; southwards, in the mountain corners around Joubertina, Krakeel and Louterwater, it gets 500–600 mm and more3. Streams off the Tsitsikamma feed the orchards, and hail is the price. Growers drape or fix nets over the trees, black to shield Granny Smith and Golden Delicious from sunburn, white over red varieties such as Fuji; a snowstorm in 2020 collapsed eight hectares of nets on one farm, and a hailstorm the next year destroyed most of its orchards in minutes5.

The region is substantial. Hortgro’s 2024 tree census gives Langkloof East 2,832 ha of apples and Langkloof West 1,145 ha, together about 16% of South Africa’s 25,080 ha1; Hortgro’s own writers put the valley at up to a fifth of the country’s apples and pears3. The towns along Route 62, Haarlem, Avontuur, Misgund, Joubertina, Kareedouw, Louterwater, Krakeel and Assegaaibos, sit among the orchards11. Farms are mostly family businesses passed down the generations, and the growers are known for planting fewer hectares than their water would allow, to survive the droughts that come round5.

What’s picked

South Africa’s apple harvest begins at the end of January and runs to June, peaking between February and April2. On one Krakeel farm the 2026 harvest began with early Golden Delicious in the first days of February, followed by Royal Gala, before the crop went into controlled-atmosphere storage14. Granny Smith and Golden Delicious are the late, high-value varieties the growers insure, and Fuji among the red ones; hail-marked fruit that is still good enough goes to the juicing factory5. Hail in November 2022 cut the next year’s crop in the Langkloof as it did in Ceres2.

On the table

In Afrikaans an apple is an appel15; in isiXhosa, the Eastern Cape’s majority language, it is i-apile, plural ama-apile16. The valley’s fruit is eaten fresh and exported, counter-seasonal to the northern hemisphere, and what hail has marked is pressed for juice5.

Notes

  • The valley lies between Herold, near George, and The Heights beyond Twee Riviere; a low ridge inside it divides a northern and a southern section, the southern Klein Langkloof being a prominent apple area9,11.
  • The first public section of the Avontuur Railway opened on 1 November 1905; the Apple Express tourist train once ran on its seaward end10.
  • The Kou-Kamma municipality that covers the eastern valley takes its name from the Kouga and Tsitsikamma mountains12.
  • Hail netting costs about R110,000 a hectare for draped nets and R250,000 or more for fixed ones5.

Where the sources disagree

  • 1903 or 1904. Hortgro says the Baldie farm at Misgund was established in 19034; Farmer’s Weekly says 19045. Both credit Alexander Baldie with the valley’s first commercial apple orchard; neither dates the planting itself.
  • Elevation. No official source gives the orchards’ height. Joubertina’s map tile averages 593 m13 and the railhead at Avontuur is 871 m10.
  • Harvest months are the national figures2 and one farm’s 2026 dates14; no Langkloof-specific calendar was found.
The Langkloof
Where The Langkloof is.

Sources

  1. Key Deciduous Fruit Statistics 2024, Hortgro, July 2025. Supports: the 2024 tree census: Langkloof East 2,832 ha, Langkloof West 1,145 ha, 25,080 ha nationally.
  2. Fresh Deciduous Fruit Annual: South Africa (GAIN report SF2023-0040), USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, 3 November 2023. Supports: the national harvest from the end of January to June, peaking February to April; the 2022 hail.
  3. Sometimes you just have to weather the weather, Gerrit Rautenbach, Hortgro, 27 May 2021. Supports: the share of the national pome crop; the mountain ranges; the meaning of Tsitsikamma; rainfall.
  4. Next Generation Series: 'I want to be a farmer', Louise Brodie, Hortgro, 23 April 2018. Supports: the Baldie family at Misgund since 1903 and Alexander Baldie's first commercial orchard.
  5. Survival strategies of farmers in the Langkloof, Glenneis Kriel, Farmer's Weekly, 4 July 2022. Supports: Misgund since 1904; hail, nets and their costs; varieties; the juicing factory; the 2020 snow and 2021 hail.
  6. Apples in Early Days, Buks Nel and Henk Griessel, Tru-Cape Fruit Marketing. Supports: the Kroontjie and Tjeek apples and the old tree at Misgund.
  7. The quest for the origins of the apple tree, Hortgro, 20 September 2020. Supports: the first apples picked at the Cape on 17 April 1662.
  8. Die geskiedenis van die Langkloof tot 1795, J. J. Swiegers, MA thesis, Stellenbosch University, 1994. Supports: the Khoi inhabitants, the passing cattle farmers and the twenty loan farms of 1760–1765.
  9. Langkloof, Wikipedia. Supports: the valley's length and ends; its naming in 1689; Joubertina's founding in 1907; the Klein Langkloof.
  10. Avontuur Railway, Wikipedia. Supports: the railway's purpose, dates, length, gauge and altitude at Avontuur.
  11. Langkloof Valley, Eastern Cape, South African History Online, 18 March 2021. Supports: the Cape Fold Belt and the towns along Route 62.
  12. Kou-Kamma Local Municipality, Kou-Kamma Local Municipality. Supports: the municipality's name.
  13. Joubertina topographic map, topographic-map.com. Supports: the elevation around Joubertina.
  14. Fresh Langkloof pears, apples into storage as Middle East war unfolds, FreshPlaza, 13 March 2026. Supports: one farm's 2026 harvest dates and storage.
  15. appel, Wiktionary. Supports: the Afrikaans word.
  16. apple: i-apile, isixhosa.click. Supports: the isiXhosa word and its plural.