Intense, honey sweet flavour with a tangy tartness when fresh that mellows after about three weeks off the tree. The bite is medium-crisp, and the white flesh is very juicy. Good for apple sauce. A reliable, heavy cropping tree that definitely needs thinning to avoid a biennial cropping habit. RHS Plants for Pollinators.
Browse our range of apple trees or all our fruit trees.
Rootstocks:
Patio trees use a M9 rootstock with a high graft to control their vigor.
Pollination Partners for Elstar:
Your trees are self sterile and their flowers must be pollinated to make fruit.
Elstar is in pollination Group D.
This means that they will cross-pollinate with other apple trees in pollination Groups C, D and E.
See our Guide to Apple Tree Pollination for a full list of partners & more tips about pollination.
Disease notes:
Disease susceptibility: Scab, Mildew. Somewhat susceptible to fire blight.
Known variously around the world as Luster, Lustre Elstar, Valstar, or Elton (not Elton Beauty, which is a British apple that was bred around the same time). It was bred by Dr. Tijs Visser between 1955 and 1963 at the Dutch Institut für Gärtnerische Pflanzenzüchtung, and then introduced commercially in 1972. Its parents are Golden Delicious (seed) and Ingrid Marie (pollen), and it is in turn one parent of Santana.