Apple Day 2011

Baking - delicious!

We had a very successful Apple Day on Saturday 24th September.  Wonderful home baking by plotholders and community orchard volunteers sold out. 















 We pressed gallons of apple (and some pear) juice with the help of young and old.  Almost all the fruit we pressed was fallen fruit gathered from plots on our site, so not only were we all drinking delicious juice we were using food that would otherwise have been wasted.

 Loading press with crushed apple.

Ready to be pressed.

Apple Tasting in the pavilion was also very popular.  We asked people on the site to provide us with some apples for people to sample, and we also had a couple of varieties from the community orchard. Even though the trees on the orchard are very young, we had some Fillingham Pippin (a delicious crisp eater) and one very large cooker - Lord Suffield. This is as close as we can get to having a Manchester apple variety. It was created in Middleton and we're very lucky to have a tree as they aren't widely available.  Phil Rainford from the Northern Fruit Group provided us with a scion when we had the grafting workshop in March 2010 after a long search to find somewhere with a Lord Suffield tree.

The Lord Suffield apple was huge - a testament to the advice to thin your crop to get a smaller number of larger apples... I took all but one fruit bud off when they formed and the result was a very large fruit.  Yes, I know that strictly speaking you shouldn't let any fruit form on very young trees, but if you can't locate any trees like the one you have locally, isn't it important to get an idea of what the fruit looks and taste like? 

Its a yellow cooker and everyone who tasted a slice of Lord Suffield said it was a good cooker - the sort that would cook into a delicious puree - and that it was not too tart either, so wouldn't need much sweetening.

Visitors to the community orchard  might have spotted a wonderful "Orchard 49" sign on the shed door, crafted from recycled materials by Trisha Church - thanks, its wonderful.

Thanks also to all the volunteers on the day, the bakers, the cleaners and gleaners for making the event such a success.

Grafted Tree news

This week, with the help of Peter Nichol from the Northern Fruit Group, the trees that were created at our March grafting workshop were pruned. Mainly this involved pruning out the growth underneath the graft, where the rootstock was growing vigourously. This was also an opportunity to look closely at how the trees were growing and to take the tape off a few to see how the union between the rootstock and the scion had taken.

For first time grafters there was some very good work (said Peter). None of the plum grafts took, but the rootstock has bulked up over the year, offering a better chance of success next year. The other interesting development is that where the grafting failed some of the rootstock has branched out - providing two stems on which to graft. This means we could grow a damson on one side and a greengage on the other (for example). These are called family trees, and are available commercially, but we will be able to choose material from particularly tasty plums or apples available on the allotment site or from other communtity orchards locally to graft.

We have 30 apple trees, some of which are duplicates. The most prolific grafters were Teresa and Natalia who both created 6 trees with Pete creating 5 trees.

Grafting News

The 40 trees we created at our workshop in March are almost all growing. I've been surprised by the speed with which this has happened. One of the new trees, a variety called Lord Suffield is also flowering.

I thought this was astonishing, but our local Northern Fruit Group expert, Peter Nichol tells me that its very common. It all depends on the type of wood you have on your scion (the bit you take from a tree and join by grafting with the rootstock). If its got fruit buds on it (rather than growth buds) it will flower - even though its just a twig. We just need to rub any fruit off so they don't grow on.

Other news - we had a work day on the early May bank holiday and got a lot of work done. Some of the twice dug ground is going to be used by volunteers who don't have an allotment to grow a few crops that will be finished by Nov-January when the trees will be planted.

Last weekend we took advantage of a skip on the allotment site and disposed of all the debris that had been dug up (plastic, glass, rubble) - so the plot looks much tidier now.