The Orchards Open House festival is held at the beginning of October in Chrystków, just outside Bydgoszcz, in the Lower Vistula Landscape Park. This event is designed to promote diverse local varieties of apples, as well as to provide practical assistance in establishing traditional home orchards. During the festival visitors can also view a collection of fruit trees established in Chrystków in 1998 in order to secure the diversity of apple varieties found in the Lower Vistula Valley. This is a sort of "gene bank" for future generations, which containing over 250 apple trees with 84 varieties of the fruit, as well as nearly 80 pear trees with 30 varieties.

"The Lower Vistula Valley and Poland as a whole can boast of diversity in our apple crop," says Jarosław Pająkowski, director of the Vistula Landscape Park in Świecie, and the founder of the collection. "Some are dessert apples, meaning they are fit to be eaten raw, while others are for processing. There are some which can be used both ways. For example, the Jakub Lebel is an apple that can't be eaten raw, but can be used to make delicious applesauce. The diversity of crops means that the harvest can take all season. Some apples can survive the whole winter in storage, and serve as a valuable source of vitamins in the time before the harvest. We want to make people aware of these things."

Chrystków isn't the only place where old varieties of fruit trees and bushes are gathered. The largest collection of such plants in Poland can be found at the Gardening Institute in Skierniewice. Others also grow in the Botanical Gardens of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Bolestraszyce, near Przemyśl in the south-east of Poland.