Cob Oven workshop April 2012

On Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st April a group of plotholders and local people came together to learn how to build a cob oven on the allotment site. Local Food funded the 2 day workshop, which was run by Annabel from Earthed .  The workshop ran from 9-5 on two days, so everyone who participated put in hours of hard labour.

The photos here show the oven in its final form. Its full of sand right now, but once its dry this will come out and it can be fired up.  More photos of the whole process of making the oven can be viewed here.

The oven is going to be a huge asset, as we can bake pizza, bread and other things in it - which will be great for open days and socialising on the site.

Sculpture with a nature/orchard theme

See the apple with a visitor?

Grafting Workshop March 2012

Saturday 10th March 2012 saw us hosting another grafting workshop at the allotment site.  We welcomed friends from Rylands Kitchen Garden, a community allotment project in Longford Park along to make some trees as part of the Longford Park Centenary celebrations.  We also hosted Anna visiting from Glossop who is developing a communty allotment, plus 4 Orchard volunteers, and Rob from Moss Brook Growers who was attending to graft some Morello Cherries.

The session was run by Tom Adams from Shropshire.  It will take a while to know if our efforts have been successful, but we had a wonderful day learning how. The session was funded by a Local Food grant.

Here are some photos of Tom and participants busy grafting pear, apple and cherry.

Lorna taping up the graft point

Anna  cutting the rootstock

Hilary using a handing tool to graft

Claire tidying up her scion before joining it to the rootstock

Tom taping up the graft point on a cherry

Trees planted March 4th 2012!

Despite the weather we planted more trees at the community orchard today.  It stopped raining long enough for us to press on with the work.

Big thanks to everyone who helped: Lorna, Claire, Pete, Richard and Debbie.

We planted:

Apple Acklam Russet
Apple Balsam
Apple Golden Spire
Apple Hunt's House
Apple Merlin's apple
Apple New Bess Pool
Apple Newton Wonder
Apple Rosemary Russet
Apple Sisson's Worksop Newton

Pear Beth
Pear Onward

Cherry Stella
Cherry Morello

Quince Portugal

These were all purchased with the grant from Local Food which is part of the Big Lottery Fund's Changing Spaces programme to help communities enjoy and improve their local environments.

Some of the apple and pear trees were planted beside arches and will be trained to grow up and over the arches. The idea for this came from the Garden Organic orchard at Ryton Gardens.  It will take many years for them to reach this size, but the picture shows what we have in mind.

Apple Arch at Garden Organic's orchard

An added bonus today was a surprise visit from Peter Nichol from the Northern Fruit Group. Peter came to drop off some scions for our grafting workshop next weekend, but we asked him to help us prune the trees,  many thanks!