Author James Russell contacted me about research for a new book about cider. A previous book called “Manmade Eden - Historic Orchards in Somerset and Gloucestershire” is well worth a mention at this point. It features interviews with John Thatcher and Julian Temperley, lots of great pictures and material on the history of cider that I think readers would enjoy.
The West Country is famed for its orchards, but why are they here? As the campaign to save and celebrate English orchards gathers momentum, this book explores their fascinating and - until now - neglected history. Why is Glastonbury known as Avalon, the Isle of Apples? What made Redstreak Cyder the most popular drink of the seventeenth century? Who was Dr Ashmead, cultivator of the connoisseur’s favourite apple, Ashmead’s Kernel? How did a Somerset vicar come to make cider for Queen Victoria? This rich, wide-ranging book takes a long historic look at changing fashions and fortunes - asking why thirteenth-century monks and Edwardian landowners planted orchards, and why post-war governments paid farmers to destroy them. The author argues that Apple Day (October 21) should be made our national autumn holiday. He examines the role of Common Ground, the National Trust and other organisations in preserving and restoring orchards, and asks: what can we do to make our orchards as profitable as they were in centuries past?
Pruning the bramley, famous cooking apple. Red flush, good quality cooking apple, ripens to yellow sweetness if kept long enough. Challenging tree. Space between the trees. Planted 10 years ago. The bramley is a big tree. In an ordinary garden you may want to put it on a small rootstock.
Each year we want the tree to do three thing. Produce new growth, formation of new buds , and fruit on old buds. Bramley is a tip bearing tree so don’t go round snipping off all the tips that’s the wrong way to prune it. Take out downward growing branches. Or any too high. We don’t go up trees with ladders any more.
Looking at the pruning saw, more important than the secteurs. Needs to be sharp or else not fit for purpose. Cut on the back stroke. Japanese silky fox. Removing a branch which is to low, to show how to use the saw. Not touching the tree. Stabalise by holding the branch. It goes right through in two cuts. Definitive pruning cut up against the collar.
Spur pruning. Fruit buds turn into spurs after a few years then get crowded. Overgrown spur systems need to be thinned. Cut out the lower groups to produce only 3 or 4 apples per system instead of 8 or 9
Abundance - Grow Sheffield
Abundance is a project to harvest the seasonal glut of local fruit like apples, pear and plums. Each year hundreds of fruit trees go unpicked either because people don’t notice them, may not be physically able to harvest them or there are just too many fruits at one time. Abundance is a team of volunteers who have been helping harvest city fruit and redistributing the surplus to the community on a non-profit basis - to community cafes, nurseries, Surestarts and individuals. Abundance has been distributing free fresh fruit around the streets of central Sheffield and Meadowhall Shopping Centre from the custom designed mobile fruit unit.
Although its late in the season if you have a fruit tree and want help with harvesting please contact us – you will get the first share.
( Probably a bit late now, but worth flagging up for next year )
The Apple Source Book
by Sue Clifford and Angela King with Philippa Davenport
for Common Ground
Hodder & Stoughton, October 2007 304 pages b&w illustrations
a philosophical and practical guide to
growing apples communally or for yourself
eating them simply or in style
whilst enriching both our culinary and cultural landscapes.
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Common Ground,
Gold Hill House, 21 High Street, Shaftesbury, Dorset SP7 8JE UK
+44(0)1747 850820
is available from Amazon at £10.19 and from the 
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