One Sunday in a colour supplement there was a piece on old English apple varieties with a special offer from Highfield nurseries for 6 cordon apple trees. The varieties were Early Victoria, Michaelmas Red, Orleans Reinette, Ellison's Orange, D'Arcy Spice and Ashmead's Kernel.Accompanying the article were watercolours of each fruit. The very names of these apples sounded like poetry to me, the paintings were delectable, the descriptions of their flavours tantalising. Why couldn't we taste these apples, thought I? Surely there had to be more to apples than Cox and Granny Smith. I was hooked from that moment.
BELOW A view of young apple trees in blossom at our apple day picnic in spring 2002.
The years passed-work, mortgage, kids, the usual. I earned reasonable money but had no time. I looked in the local papers for land adverts and quite often 1 or 2 acre paddocks came on the market for 3 thousand quid or so. I thought, I'll have one of them one of these days for an orchard, but not this year we're too busy..
Then came the property boom of the late eighties. When I tried to buy a bit of land, was horrified by the price hike. I kicked myself for not having done it a few years earlier-prices were £20,000 an acre and worse. We more or less gave up our dream.
Then came the property crash, a lot of speculators got their fingers burned, and one day in the summer of 1992 I saw an advert that made me blink, rub my eyes, look again, and yes, it still said 9 acres in Durley for £35,000. It wasn't a misprint, but a neglected bit of rough pasture owned for decades by a widow in Basingstoke who rightly reckoned she would be better off with the interest on such a sum than the paltry rent she received for the grazing. We bought it, legal ownership going through on September the 11th 1992. We knelt in thankful prayer on the land and asked God to grant us success.
4 months later 3 men and a woman tucked into a fine lunch at my expense at the Farmer's Home pub in Durley. They had just planted an orchard and 300 yards of new hedgerow. One of the men, Paul, a professional gardener, said "I've seen many apple trees planted in my lifetime, but never with so much care." We called the first planting Bunyards, after the Bunyards of Kent who wrote so inspirationally about English apples around the turn of the 19th/20th century. It contained varieties planted based on our reading, we hadn't been able to taste many of these apples since they were unavailable in shops. Varieties were Bramley, Ellison's Orange, Ribston Pippin, Laxton's Epicure, Egremont Russet, Sunset, Ashmead's Kernel, Spartan, Winter King (Winston), Sturmer Pippin, James Grieve, Kidd's Orange Red, Suntan, Lord Lambourne, Orleans Reinette, Red Pippin, plus a few plums (Victoria, Yellow Pershore, Merryweather Damson, Cambridge Gage). We also planted blackcurrants and Christmas trees (Norway Spruce) between the trees to try to make some money by taking an alternative crop from between the young trees before they filled up the space. I don't recommend doing this after our rather messy experience! The currants just about paid for themselves, the Spruces were more trouble than they were worth.
The next stage of the orchard was planted in 1997. The theme of this orchard, named Filbarrel after the old cider apple, slightly larger at 1.5 acres than Bunyards, was cider and rare varieties. 64 cider apples on MM111 large rootstocks were planted at 20 feet apart with Sunset apples on MM106 in between them to take a crop while the cider trees grew up. This has worked reasonably well although due to light sandy soil the trees haven't grown as quickly as I'd hoped. (In the winter of 2005/6 we removed the Sunset interplant trees to give the cider apples more room, the orchard is looking better for it. In spring 2007 I 'crown lifted' all the cider trees and cut back the Crimson King cider apples back to the trunk and main branches and top grafted them over to Dabinett and Hary Master's Jesey, which are more reliable croppers and less prone to disease. The Crimson King fruits rotted on the tree most years-they are a reccomended cider fruit but we have found them our worst performer by far-perhaps they would do better in a cooler climate. The grafts have taken about 90% as of 12th June.
We now hope to let the cider apples on MM11 stock in the Filbarrel orchard get really big and manage the orchard very minimally, as a place of beauty and an informal camp site for sleep overs etc with maybe a light crop of 100 gallons of high quality cider almost as a by product. We are developing it as a wild flower meadow with trees. We let any interesting wild flowers that appear stand by mowing around them and have bought in some Cotswold flower seed like corn cockle, marsh marigold, poppy etc and are going for maximum bioderversity and minimum inputs of nutrient and energy, even if it means a smaller crop.)
Cider varieties were Kingston
Black, Crimson King, Sweet Alford (Le Bret), Yarlington Mill, Dabinett, Harry Master's
Jersey and Tremlett's Bitter. More about these under varieties.
All the trees in this orchard and the next were grafted by me to save money-several £thousands were saved. We grafted the cider trees on MM111 to give bigger, longer lived, trees. The sandy nature of the soil has not helped, but they are growing better now as the roosts have got down. This very light sandy soil is far from ideal for apples but it's what we had. As the late John Seymour wrote, 'Give a man an acre of desert and he will make it into a garden, rent a man an acre of garden and he will make it into a desert.' Ownership and continuity are good-you will invest for the future as you hope to see ht ebenefit.
The trees took better than our earlier planting since we were not hamstrung by our earlier refusal to use herbicide and pesticide-the first planting had had to struggle unequally against insect and fungal pests as we waited for the "natural balance" of pests and predators which never came. We realised we had to start a spray programme like everyone else or abandon the project. Julia ended up planting a lot of the trees herself in the late winter of 1997/8 after I hurt myself in a cycling accident. She did a pretty good job, but its better for two people to plant a tree.
The rest of this orchard is made up of rare varieties such as Pitmaston
Pineapple, Saint Edmund's Pippin, Adam's Pearmain, Miller's Seedling
and a few others, as well as some sound 'bulk' varieties such as Bramley,
Lambourne and Kidd's Orange Red.
We planted the final orchard
in 1999/2000. Resisting the temptation to call it our Millennium orchard,
we named it after William Cobbet,
the 18th Century radical, writer, MP and farmer who lived in Botley, our
village's most celebrated historical resident. Cobbett's
was a simplified orchard made up of 12 rows of 33 trees each made up of
the 'bulk' varieties we thought would sell best. We planted 3
rows of Lord Lambourne, 2 of Kidd's Orange Red, half each of Sturmer Pippin
and Orleans Reinette, 1 of Epicure, 2 of Egremont Russet, 1 of Winter King,
2 of Spartan (this was a mistake as despite it's merits, this variety does not sell well and
is very prone to scab and canker, I grafted the Spartans over to Suntan and Ashmead's
Kernel). In the centre of the field there is a space surrounded
by Sunset, which always produces profuse a dense show of large pink
blossom. This creates a great visual effect at blossom time. Behind them in the direction of Mincingfield
Lane are 2 rows of Bramley, and beyond them a row of Merryweather Damsons.
Beyond that are (were, see below) blackcurrants, gooseberries, a few more plums, some rare
apples and 3/4 of an acre of Market Garden area, sadly neglected due to
time and energy constraints. We hoped to use this to develop an organic
vegetable garden to support a local box scheme should we gain permission
to build and live on the holding as we intended, but for various reasons we have indefinitely shelved this. The planners are extremely hostile to the idea of us being allowed to live on our land-I mean, it might set a precedent-you could have any Tom Dick or Harriet buying 9 acres of neglected pasture, spending a decade turning it into a productive orchard, planting thousands of broadleaved woodland trees and then getting planning permission for a three bedroom family home after only 10 years. I mean, that would be the end of the countryside if people were allowed to do that! Countryside development planning should be done in the proper and traditional manner-huge backhanders from big corporations to allow massive housing developments while we destroy what's left of our agriculture and buy all our food from Brazil and China.
The soft fruit proved to be unprofitable, so it has gone. Not that profit is our main motive, but when we couldn't sell blackcurrants or gooseberries for enough to pay ourselves the miniumum wage just for PICKING the fruit (not a penny for growing, transporting and serving at a market stall etc) it was time to re-evaluate, so all 120 currant and berry bushes (except half a dozen for our personal use) have been dug out and burned. Opal, Victoria, Marjorie's Seedling and Blue Tit plums have gone in their place. Plums are easier to pick and sell than currants and berries. Nobody will buy gooseberries I'm afraid. I don't think people know what they are anymore, much less what to do with them.
We have reduced the number of trees to give them more space, removing the commoner and less popular varieties first, Sunset for example, which is a lovely apple but tends to go a bit soft by November which many people find unacepptable. We have reduced the number of Sunset by about half. Now there are about 800 fruit trees and about half a mile of hedgerow, plus the poplar windbreaks and the copses of willow, larch, cherry, chestnut, birch, hazel and oak etc. They are lovely. We chose which trees to plant for the original plantings in 1993 and 97 based on books and intuition. The final orchard, Cobbet's, was informed by what we knew sold well. We made reasonable but flawed choices, based on our interpretation of the limited information available to us One reason for this web site is to help others who might be inclined to plant trees to make better informed choices than we could. contact hayes373(at)btinternet(dot)com if you want to bounce ideas off us about a new orchard, however small.
The orchard has become quite a wildlife haven. It is well accepted that sensitively managed mixed agricultural land supports more wildlife than purely 'natural' land, we have observed kestrels raising a family, feral cats hunting voles (there was a vole population explosion due to the enclosure of the orchard to keep rabbits out) Grass snakes are observed from time to time and foxes and deer often pass through the wildlife corridor of our copse. 2 sorts of woodpecker and a tawny owl are frequently seen. Buzzards have been seen much more frequently over the last 2 years, there is a family of three we often see whirling and mewing above us as we work (or indeed look up at the sky with a mug of cider in hand, an agreeable activity especially after using a scythe.) We are managing the large copse to spread bluebells, snowdrops, primroses, foxgloves and other wild flowers under the trees. I use a scythe rather than weedkiller to control nettles there to encourage plant diversity.
The badgers are less welcome. They dig holes, damage our crops, deposit their disgusting excrement everywhere and make holes through and dig under our rabbit fences. We gave up growing sweetcorn after they destroyed the entire crop 2 years running. Their numbers have quadrupled since they were protected. Our neighbours dislike them as much as we do and most keep fierce dogs running free on their land, which is the only legal thing you can do to keep badgers (or burglars) away. One of them, a psychotic Alsatian, barks at me in a very frightening way whenever I am within say 100 feet of the boundary fence. Of course, the dogs drive all the local badgers on to our dog-free land, which they also love because we maintain such an interesting environment and grow so many tasty things. They cause considerable mess and damage. We could face prison if we so much as blocked up one of their tunnels. I nearly broke my ankle in a grass covered badger shit hole last week. I wonder, would the badger lovers, RSPCA or Parliament have compensated me if I'd broken my ankle and had to have 3 months off work?
The mixed deciduous hedges hedges (whitethorn, sloe, hazel, field maple, wild rose, quince and odds and bits) are now up to 15 feet tall and yielding a sustainable harvest of hazel poles, and the poplar wind shelter belts are up to 60 feet tall and, with the white willows in the copse, are visible from the football pitch in Kytes lane a mile away. Hopefully we are at least carbon neutral!
PS it is now June 2007, I am tidying and updating the site one piece at a time and will add some new pictures in a gallery soon. Some of the dates don't add up as I've left old bits as I add new bits. The story continues.
Stephen Hayes
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