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

Open Day - 19th August 2012

OTAGS held an Open Day on Sunday 19th August. There were Scarecrows to see as well as pizzas from the new Cob Oven... and of course Orchard 49 to visit. Sadly we didn't have a brilliant day for it.  But we were there and here are some photos I took of some of the trees that we grafted ourselves in 2010. You can see that they are with fruit.  Two are being grown as cordon trees - trained to grow in a small space. In our case along the path fence line. Equally they could be grown along a sunny wall in your back yard.

Apple - Burr Knot - Cordon Tree

Apple - Laxton Superb - growing as a bush tree

Apple Minshull Crab - cordon (its not a crab apple).

We are very much learning about how to train the trees. So you can see with the minshull crab cordon we actually have two stems, as it grew that way, so we're letting ti grow along two stems rather than one. Peter Nichol from the Northern Fruit Group is helping us learn how best to train the trees.

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?

Orchard Progress

It occurred to me that there haven't been many pictures of the orchard itself on the blog. Today was a barmy 23 degrees C sunny September day so I took some photos.  They can be viewed via this link to our Picasa web album.

When growing young trees you are advised to take any fruit off the trees in their early years, so that the trees develop a strong root system.  So, when you look at these photographs there isn't much to see, fruit wise. Hopefully though you'll see significant progress in how the orchard looks. We've lots of work still to do but we're getting there.

Here is a photo of the sign Trisha made for us.

Low Carbon Preserving Workshop

Saturday 10th September saw OTAGS hosting a preserving workshop in association with Cracking Good Food. The aim of the session was to show how you can manage gluts of produce without spending hours cooking chutneys!  Vicki Leng, local cook and preserving enthusiast took participants through how to dehydrate apples, salt beans, pickle cucumbers and dehydrate tomatoes all in the 3 hour session.

The essential piece of equipment we used during the day was a dehydrator. It has 14 square feet of drying space, and is designed to run on a low heat (the temperature range can be set between (29 - 68 °C) whilst at the same time running a fan to dry the food out.  So unlike dehydrating food in your oven its energy efficient and you can then store food in jars without the need to run a freezer.  Food preserved this way will keep for at least 9 months, so you can be eating sun riped tomatoes that you've grown long after the UK tomato growing season has ended.   If they are really really dry you can just jar them once they've been dehydrated. Or if they have some moisture remaining pack them into small jars and cover with olive oil.

Vicki showing Claire, Dave and Roy how the tomatoes are coming along in the dehydrator.

Similarly, Apple rings are really easy to process with the dehydrator - simply core, thinly slice, dip into some water with lemon juice to stop them from discolouring, load into the dehydrator for 3 hours then pack into sterilised jars.

We also salted beans, which was quick and straightforward. Vicki explained that this isn't a technique that enables you to serve up green beans that will taste the same as those you cook freshly picked in the usual way (e.g. steam). Rather its one way of managing part of your bean glut that doesn't require freezer space or use of fossil fuels.  Very simply, using a clean sterilised jar we packed sliced green beans (french or runner) in layers with salt. A layer of salt followed by a layer of beans, then another layer of salt until the jar was full.  After the beans and the salt have been in the jar overnight you can top up the jar packing more beans and salt in, as the salt draws the water out of the beans which makes them shrink.

We tasted some salted beans that Vicki had de-salted earlier in the day and while they didn't taste like fresh beans adding them to soups, stews and chillis would certainly work... once you've rinsed them to remove as much salt as possible.

The session was funded by our Local Food fund grant for Orchard 49.  Thanks to Laura for organising the workshop and to Vicki for sharing her knowledge with us.

Beginnings

In 2008 Old Trafford Amateur Gardeners' Society (OTAGS) committee decided to adopt a hard to let plot on its site in Old Trafford. This plot, number 49, had not been properly cultivated since 1995 so it seemed a good idea to develop the plot into a community orchard.

We have lots of ideas about how to do this, including growing trees from scratch, by grafting onto rootstock using scions from other established community orchards in the area. We feel this will be an interesting approach, rather than buying them from nurseries and thought that it would be interesting to record this process and share it using a blog.

We hope to submit a bid for Local Food Funding to enable us to buy equipment for the orchard and the site (e.g. an apple press to make the most of all the apples already being grown on the allotments) and to run some workshops (e.g. a grafting workshop next year).