Harvest 2010 part II

We have finished picking all our Jonagolds, so that’s the last lot of juice apples picked through, (just made it before the starlings!) and we have now finished the cider apple harvest at West Bradley too. We’re slightly ahead of time at West Bradley because it was not a bumper crop this year.  The fruit was a little slow to fall which is good because it made up some of the size it lost earlier in the year, but without really cold weather the crop stays on the trees and it makes harvesting more time consuming.

We have finished all the juice pressing and bottling - we try to get the apples off the tree and into the bottle inside 48 hours - and we are well ahead with the cider pressing.  We still have about another 20,000 litres of cider to make at West Bradley but the quality has been spectacular and we are really pleased.

The Kingfisher Award scheme

The Kingfisher Award Scheme (KAS) has been involving Primary Schools in their local environment since it was first launched in Devon at the instigation of the late poet laureate Ted Hughes and friends in 1992.  The Somerset project is run by Michael Brown and his wife Utta.


The objective is to provide children with an opportunity to go onto farms to explore the natural world and and discover the relationship between food, farming and wildlife.


Children come with their entire class for one session in early June. This year the sessions will be held at the National Trust's Barrington Court property from Tuesday 4 June to Friday 11 June. The children explore a variety of topics on the subject of orchards and wildlife and then return to their schools to create a project over the following weeks.


Neil Macdonald from Orchard Groundforce will be a tutor on the sessions this year, helping children to build high rise skyscrapers for insects such as beetles and bees, like the one above.


In July a grand final and picnic takes place and the projects are judged, with a prize being awarded to the winning class.

Michael Brown is one of the founders of the Brown & Forrest smokery near Langport, and is seen here with Neil Macdonald inspecting a graft on a tree in the orchard at West Bradley.