Sunny Apple Day - 2012

Today was Apple Day at the allotment site and Orchard 49.  Juice was pressed, apples and potatoes baked in our cob oven and we had samples of apples grown on the orchard for people to taste.  We basked in autumnal sunshine and warm - delightful.

Some of our apple samples on the lovely oak bench in the sunshine

Work for the day, when not talking to visitors, was some hoeing - using a beautiful osillating hoe (Hydra Swing Hoe) from Implementations - who gifted the tool to the Orchard last year. We also painted the trees with fruit tree grease to prevent codling moth next year and picked some apples - lovely they were too.

Claire making light work of hoeing with the wonderful Hydra Swing Hoe

Christmas came early!

Orchard 49 had an early Christmas present from Implementations, the UK supplier of PKS Gardening Tools.  Debbie has invested in these wonderful tools for her own use and gets a newsletter from the company every so often.  The last one mentioned that they wanted to gift some tools to a community project, asking people to write back to nominate their project.

So, Debbie wrote about Orchard 49 and Jane decided to give Orchard 49 the Christmas gift for 2011.  We got to choose £100 worth of tools and chose a hydra hoe (as we do a lot of hoeing!) and a nunki weeder - which will be invaluable for weeding around the base of our young trees as they get established.

We've not had a chance to use the tools yet, as the weather in December has been very very wet, but will do early in 2012.

A big thank you to Implementations for this gift, we will treasure these wonderful tools.