Mid summer work session 2014

We had a glorious work session yesterday evening. Warm and sunny, its not rained for at least 2 weeks so the ground is baked hard. We busied ourselves with watering the trees (using the land drainage pipe put in when the trees were planted to get straight to the roots), giving the trees a foliar feed, building a raised bed, pruning and tying in of vines.

Here are some pics taken yesterday.

Lorna tying in the grape vine

We have a percola with a bench underneath which has two grape vines and two thornless blackberry plants climbing up it.  Lorna isn't a giant, she is standing on the bench! 

Pete building a very long raised bed.

We share a fairly ugly fence line with a bakery, and in the winter we planted some raspberry canes along part of it. This is the next phase - we will plant more fruit, training it along the fence to hide the metalwork.The raised bed is made from recycled scaffold planks.  

The next two photos are of the fruit arch - which is coming along nicely (needs some prunign and tying in too) and the long fenceline which has cordon apple, pear and plum along its length. 

Fruit arch - apple and pear

Fenceline with cordon trees.

 We are always keen to have more people helping on the orchard, and I can't think of a nicer way to spend a mid summer evening!  We're there from 6.30-8 pm on Mondays.

New Path and Fencing

On Friday 17th September OTAGS community orchard volunteers worked with Wates Living Space NW to lay a path and construct fencing for the orchard. We were lucky to have great weather on the day. For more on this see the Partnership Working page and the photos of the various stages of this job.

Thanks to all who took part.