Open Farm Sunday workshop at West Bradley Orchards

On March 16 Orchard Ground Force hosted a local workshop for prospective participants in this year’s Open Farm Sunday.

In 2011 the event will take place on Sunday June 12.  Having participated in it ourselves we are keen supporters - the day is attended nationally by even more people than go to the Glastonbury Festival - and that means something round here!

Organised by LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming) the event has some heavyweight sponsors from industry and a huge amount of support and resource is available to anyone interested in taking part.

Here at Orchard Ground Force we feel really strongly about the importance of the on-farm learning experience.  Making the connection between people and their environment, between the public and the food they eat, has never been more important.

The workshop at West Bradley was given by our regional representative Jeremy Padfield and Annabel Shackelton from LEAF Head Office.  They brought with them samples of the posters, signage, leaflets, hosting and publicity information available from LEAF and discussed on-the-day activities, publicity opportunities and Health & Safety issues with an eager group.

We’ll be putting on our own event for Open Farm Sunday - more news about it in the next newsletter - and we invite you all to West Bradley Orchards on 12 June.  Please come and meet us!

For more about Open Farm Sunday do visit the website HERE and think about registering for the event.

Case study - a pollarded orchard

Owners often ask us how long it takes to turn round a problem orchard and to start seeing a profit from it.  Here is a typical example.

Nick Case farms organically at Bridgehampton in Somerset.  Three years ago he acquired an orchard, six acres planted in the traditional style, which had been pollarded by its previous owner.

“My heart sank” says Neil Macdonald “because I am only too aware of how detrimental that can be to the yield and longevity of the trees. What can happen when you pollard trees is that big sections of them can start to die back because they have come to a stop end.  Over a few years these sections will die back into the trunk and start killing the tree."

"Unless you prune these lumps right back to the trunk where they can heal so that the flow can keep moving, and you can redistribute the energy back to where you want it to be, back into fruit growth and health, the tree may never recover."

"Another problem with pollarded trees is that the tree produces a whole lot of shoots which in turn produce a dense impenetrable mass of leaves, but no fruit."

Orchard Ground Force took on the job of restoring the orchard and over the last three years has brought it back to life, pruning the new growth, redistributing the energy and bringing the trees back to health, as well as planting new trees to fill in empty spaces.

“For the first couple of years I was in negative balance,” says Nick, “but this year we have broken even, so next year we should be in the black.”

Last year the orchard yielded twelve tons of cider apples, up from ten the year before.  This year Neil Macdonald reckons he will harvest well over that, giving Nick a healthy pay cheque.

“In just three years” says Neil “it’s gone from investment to payback and the future is only upward.” 

“You have to do some shock treatment to begin with. Then there will be a little bit of pruning from time to time - just enough to keep the trees in tip top condition - and the orchard will continue to produce well for years to come, making Nick very good money, even from old trees.”

Scions

One of our major tasks this year will be grafting.  We experimented last year with grafting scions - slips of first year growth - on to mature trees.  We chose scions of Red Windsor variety and they were grafted very successfully on to mature Cox trees. 

As a variety Cox is losing its attraction to both growers and the public and top-grafting is a way of making use of the valuable root growth that the tree already has but changing the fruit variety it produces.  Red Windsor grafts on to Cox trees will produce Red Windsor apples.

The grafts are called "scions".  January is the ideal time to harvest scion wood, when the wood is at its most dormant. We look for young active one year growth of our chosen variety and we want the base of it to be about pencil thickness with plenty of leaf bud on the scion.

The grafts will be slipped under the outer bark of a branch and bound in.  All the grafts we made experimentally last year have taken and this year we will be extending the work.

Scions are quite valuable things.  We need about 600 scions to do the grafting we have planned. Last year, when we bought in the scions, it cost us about £11.50 per tree to do it, including labour. By harvesting our own scion wood this year we can probably reduce that by around £4.50 per tree, so quite an important saving.

Mistletoe - bah, humbug!

It’s fair to say that mistletoe is not our favourite thing.  Not at this time of year or indeed any time of year.  

Round here there are lots of neglected orchards that seem to specialise in growing it; the trees are in a sorry state and produce only meagre crops of apples. In time this parasite will kill the trees.

We have an invasion of mistletoe in one of our older orchards and we are puzzling about what to do about it - some of the trees will have to come right out while others will need radical pruning if they are to survive.

We have mistletoe harvesters in the orchard right now and really all they are doing is coppicing the stuff and making things worse.  If you cut the plant off you just encourage its growth elsewhere. 

And what’s more they claim they can hardly give it away.  Varieties of mistletoe vary in colour of leaves and berries and the less desirable versions with yellowy leaves and creamy berries - like ours - are not as sought after as the ones with glossy green leaves and bright white berries, some of which are imported.

The National Trust has a new campaign to encourage people to buy locally sourced mistletoe and also to plant mistletoe seeds on their apple trees.  With the demise of traditional orchards they believe that the plant is in danger of dying out and needs to be saved.

Mistletoe does in fact provide a habitat for several endangered species, such as the Mistletoe Marble Moth so if you have a tree that is so swamped that it is no longer viable for producing fruit you might feel better in the knowledge that it may be supporting these species.

Otherwise you should be managing your mistletoe’s progress with bold measures and a pruning saw.

Apple pomace

When we press the apples we end up with delicious juice and a whole lot of bits - pips, apple skins, bits of the core.  It turns out there are lots of things to be done with it to use up all the remaining goodness and encourage sustainability.

Robert Snook farms a suckler herd of Hereford beef cattle near Castle Cary, Somerset.  His wife, Sally, also runs a Bed & Breakfast business http://www.clanvillemanor.co.uk/ from their beautiful Georgian farmhouse in which she serves Orchard Pig apple juice.

This winter the farm will also be serving Orchard Ground Force apple pomace to guests, but the guests will have four legs instead of two!

Robert explains “In mid July this year, when there had been so little rain, we knew that the price of food for our cattle was going to go up.  We had no silage, no grass to cut for the second or third cut, and when someone mentioned that Orchard Ground Force had apple pomace we thought we would consider it.  It’s not that unusual - plenty of people have used it - but it was new for us.”

The pomace is rich in vitamins and roughage.  Robert stores it in a big heap in the yard.

“There’s a heat element in the pomace so most of the time we don’t cover it, because we don’t want it to break down and ferment.  But we also don’t want it too dry because the cattle don’t like it if it’s too dry.  We don’t have a roof for it, which would make it simpler, so we are just covering it with plastic sheeting when it rains a lot.”

“It’s basically carbohydrate and we balance it with a protein based product.  The cows really like it - you’d probably like it too, it smells lovely!  They push each other about to get to it and it means the grass lasts longer so they can stay outside longer.”

There is no doubt that the cows and calves consider the pomace a gourmet delight - even Robert’s beautiful Limousin bull Adam couldn’t wait to get at it.

Apple pomace is also on the menu for the Gloucester Old Spots that give Orchard Pig its name, and experiments are taking place with feeding it to the game birds on a local shoot.  The pips encourage the natural scratching behaviour of the birds.

Back at West Bradley Orchards the pomace is mixed with woodchips from the apple tree prunings and basalt dust is added - a waste product from a local quarry.  The basalt dust contains essential minerals and has long been used in Australia in the wine industry to retain moisture in the soil.  The mixture is composted for at least six weeks and then used as a mulch around the base of the new trees later in the year.

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.

Harvest 2010

How lucky we’ve been with such a dry start to the autumn.  It’s our favourite time of year and it has been beautiful.  Dry warm days and the handpickers are racing to keep ahead of the starlings!  At this time of year huge flocks of the birds form and they love the fruit as it starts to get soft and a little overripe.  They have been known to descend en masse and devour an entire crop.

The cider crop is looking good and with the dry weather all the work is getting done with the minimum of mess - a boon for pickers and processing alike.

Crop wise we are definitely down in volume.  Sugar levels are up, as we predicted and the quality and ph levels are fine.

At this time of year we also like to see what kind of one year extension growth we have managed to achieve, because that is the future of our crop.  The one year growth is looking reasonable.  We probably left a little bit too much fruit on the younger trees, which hasn’t given us quite as much growth as we would have liked, but we’re hoping to put on a bit of a spurt in the spring.

We’re going to be experimenting with putting more nutrient on a little earlier in the season.  We had a bit more scab than we would have liked, which is probably us being mean with the spraying, and we have a little bit of codling moth damage on the dessert fruit, but not anything excessive and no problem for juicing.

We have sent off our scab leaf samples for analysis and when we get the results back in a couple of weeks we will decide on our actions.  Some people kill off all the leaves with a very heavy spraying regime, but we would prefer not to do that.  Old traditional orchardmen put sheep into the orchards to eat all the leaves so there would be no carry over of spores to the next year.  Depending on the results of the analysis we might do a little judicious spraying with copper - a little spraying, with a natural product, at the right time, can save you a fortune later.