Spartan Apple Trees

Spartan Eating Apples

Spartan is a super little eating apple. It boasts a glorious red colour that deepens to a maroon red when fully ripe with whiter than white, crisp and fine flesh. Visually therefore it is tempting to eat and in practice its sweet, slightly vinous flavour makes it very popular. Cropping in October it is a relatively late eater. Its single, white blossom is very pretty and is at its best in the first half of May.

Spartan is a generous cropper that must be thinned to prevent it making a lot of undersize fruit.

It is susceptible to scab, which tends to be more of a problem in the warmer, more humid West side of the UK.
It grows & crops well even in the far North.

Browse the rest of our apple trees.

Growing and Harvesting Spartan Apples

Being an excellent pollinator, Spartan is a useful apple to include in an orchard where you may have triploid or other group B-D apples. Leave the apples on the tree for as long as you can because the flavour improves as the colour deepens. The apples do not store well because the flesh becomes woolly and soft. Keep them for up to a week only. Spartan juice is delicious and well worth the trouble so if you have excess fruit, juice them and freeze what you can. With its blossom early in May you could also surround Spartan with an array of bulbs to make for a wonderful spring display.

Features

• Height: to 4.5 m
• Use: Eating
• Pruning: Spur bearer
• Pollination: Self Fertile
• Picking: October
• Apple colour: Red
• Pollination Group: Group C
• Pollination: Excellent pollinator
• Best grown in the East of UK, where scab is less severe
• Not recommended for organic growers

History and Trivia

This apple has nothing to do with Greece; unusually, it is the product of a formal scientific breeding programme carried out during the 1920s in Summerland, British Columbia. Rarely do we find apple varieties coming from the Americas to us but it has proved to be a fortunate move and the apple is now grown widely across the UK having been introduced in 1936. One of Spartan's parents is the American apple McIntosh which gave it the deeply coloured skin and white flesh. Its pollen parent is said to be Newtown Pippin.