Dobele to mark 16th Apple Festival this Saturday
Dobele will host its free, 16th annual Apple Festival on October 3, coinciding with a particularly abundant apple harvest year, drawing around eight thousand visitors as usual.
The town of Dobele is preparing for its traditional autumn celebration — on Saturday, October 3, it will hold the Apple Festival for the sixteenth time. The event is free of charge and typically attracts around eight thousand visitors each year.
The festival is closely tied to the local Institute of Horticulture, which maintains a collection of roughly 600 apple tree varieties in Dobele. Beyond this existing collection, institute specialists are currently evaluating several dozen additional potential varieties, searching for those best suited to Latvia's climate.
A lengthy breeding process
The scale of this work reflects just how long and painstaking apple variety breeding can be — developing and introducing a new variety can take as long as 25 years. This process involves creating new crosses and then testing them extensively under various conditions to confirm their resilience and suitability for the local climate.
This year's festival takes place against the backdrop of an especially abundant apple harvest, adding extra significance to the event — visitors will have the chance to learn about the institute's work and the wide diversity of varieties in a year when apples are growing particularly plentifully across Latvia.
