orchard meadow

We hope that we will be able to create up to 2 acres of beautiful wild flower meadows here at Cordwood.

plantain and cowslips

When we arrived, our 'orchard' was a 28 foot high jungle of suckering cherries, blackthorn, sycamores, nettles and strangling brambles. Having cleared that lot with hand tools, we began the process of creating a wildflower meadow beneath the venerable recovered apple trees. From bare soil, grass appeared and I took a hay cut in late summer 2012.  The building of our new homes in 2013 took our attention away from the orchard flower meadow and I didn't mow the grass at the season's end or remove the hay.

Will anything struggle through the thatch of aggressive Yorkshire Fog grass this year? 

greater knapweed

Delighted, first of all to see some of the seedling hay rattle  plants coming through in patches. This parasite was introduced in 2012 from seed we had collected with Mike. It sucks the life out of the over-competitive grasses, leaving space for less vigorous meadow flowers.

We planted cowslip plugs and scattered a bag of seed collected from our old allotment in 2013. In April 2014 plugs are flowering and seedlings are fighting their way through.

I collected red campion seed in 2012 and successfully grew lots of plugs. I've transplanted plants into the orchard this year.

We also collected greater knapweed seed during our evening walks and transplanted plants and scattered seed. Somethings happenin'.

And finally, the American quamash or camassia was introduced as bulblets in spring 2013. They seemed to have disappeared and I cursed our vole neighbours and their sharp hungry teeth. But the camassias are back and stronger than ever!

red campion

Unfortunately our spring flowering crocus flowers were eaten by the wood pigeons...

I've scattered lots of other seed but it's too soon to crow. But, from nothing, we have now got the beginnings of some floral diversity.

Much more to be done. Of course and I'll be collecting seed and growing plug plants to enrich the meadow during this year. Also looking to find ways of increasing the invertebrate population.

And, then,
in high summer, Mike and hope to be using our Austrian scythes to clear the hay. Scythe training. A load of laughs. Sunny day, gentle exercise. Frothing ale or refreshing cider. It's yours for the asking......






 

work to be done ...

A friend said to me the other day 'I admire your work ethic'. It's like saying to a donkey on a treadmill 'I like your hat'.

The work has to be done, whether it's raining or not. And this is the time of year to be out in the garden preparing for the new season that awaits.

In the Woodland Garden we've had the horse chestnut taken down and I've used the logs for the edging of the new path. We have planted our ornamental elders and our first two hazels. The annual pruning in the orchard is almost complete. Thanks to Jan for her hard work. I think she will have needed a brisk rub down with straw when she got home.

At the entrance to the Cedar Walk I've removed lots of offending nettles, brambles and elder so that we have a continuous ground cover of ivy. Trev and Linda joined me for an hour here before the weather turned and I treated them to my cannelini bean and sage soup with home made bread. Bless you pals!!

Then onto the newly created little Pond Wood. Man work here moving logs. I'll feel the benefit. Then onto planting birch, hawthorn and holly transplanted from other parts of the site with Jill. Rowan, gelder rose and other natives to be added as more ground is cleared. We transplanted Nordman Firs into the pinewood and banking.

Over to the drive border to stamp on molehills and plant a couple of variegated pieris.

Then into our warm home and sodden coat and trousers into the plant room for drying.

Floors to mop before lunch.

And my hat-of-the-day was my winter Tilley. With two holes cut for my ears.

.

making wildflower meadows - pam lewis

Creating a wildflower meadow beneath our elderly apple trees is not quite a simple as just letting the grass grow. Hay meadows developed their unique flora and fauna over generations and hundreds of years. I'm trying to speed the process and am having help from my re-reading 'Making wildflower meadows' by Pam Lewis and getting lots of useful reminders.

Yellow rattle flowering in the orchard

First there's the reduction in soil fertility. Even though our ground is thin and sandy, vulgar and coarse Yorkshire Fog grass has taken up residence suggesting that there is plenty of nitrogen in the soil. Our 21st century air is polluted with increased nitrogen, giving an extra boost to nitrogen hungry plants like Yorkshire Fog. This grass swamps other meadow plants, creating a thick mat of vegetation that prevents gentler wildflowers from establishing themselves. It is difficult to remove the grass, so I scythe away the seeding tops to prevent its quest for world domination. The removal of nitrogen by taking vegetation away is said to take twenty years to achieve!!

So, I need another club in my bag - and that comes in the form of grassland parasites. Parasitic plants help to hold these swaggering meadow bullies back, and we have successfully sown small patches of annual Yellow Rattle (x) to suck away the vitality of the grasses. I'll collect this years' precious seeds when the seedheads rattle and distribute it more widely in the autumn. The eventual vision is of an orchard rich in this unusual plant.

But our 'meadow' is bereft of other flowers. So, I will beat up the grass after the hay cut in late summer and then hope to have more collected seed to distribute or plug plants to push into the soil. In a traditional hay meadow, this 'beating up' or 'poaching' as it is correctly termed would be done by the feet of grazing animals that cropped the meadow brasses after the hay cut is taken. The damage to the sward then provides opportunities for the flower seeds to take hold.

I have mowed a lovely path through the orchard grasses but Pam Lewis suggests changing the route of the path each year. The shorter grass of the mown path benefits certain perennial plants and by varying the path, the opportunities for more young perennials increases.

 Our grass is sadly silent when it should be ringing with the stridulation of busy grasshoppers, so, I'm off on a grasshopper hunt soon. But once theyre reintroduced, I must give them the best chance of survival. Pam Lewis reminds me to leave a wide margin along the edge of the meadow that will not be cut in high summer. This will allow grassland invertebrates and other wildlife to move across for safety, shelter and food when the rest of the area is first scythed, and then mown. They can overwinter in this refuge and then move back into the grass as it grows in the spring.

A final part of the picture is using the old apple trees as hosts for climbers. Different varieties of honeysuckles and climbing and rambling roses with simple flowers will clothe the trees as the summer unfolds. 

One day, this will be an insects paradise!!

orchard progress...

Traditional orchards are increasingly rare and treasured places. They are important for wildlife and are a biodiversity action plan priority for our county.

Old orchards give invertebrates lots of nooks and cranny's for refuge, feeding and breeding. They can also be home to heritage varieties of apples - many of which are being lost as old orchards are cleared for agriculture or building.

plantain and cowslips

Discovering our own orchard, buried beneath twenty years of brambles, seedling oaks and sycamores and suckered blackthorn and cherry was a great surprise. We only guessed there were fruit trees when we saw blossom on the Google Earth images!

So, in managing the newly-discovered orchard first came the arduous business of clearing so many years of neglect. We had hoped to run pigs beneath the reclaimed fruit trees to help clear roots but weren't able to arrange this. Clearing by hand, it had to be!! Native grasses naturally recolonised the ground beneath the trees during the first spring but little else of floral interest arrived in the first year. We pruned the gangling and twisted boughs of the trees, removing 25% of the branches in January 2012 and again early in 2013. We cleared recolonising grasses from the base of each tree to allow water and nutrients to more easily reach each trees' roots. I scythed the grass in the high summer 2012 and carted the dried hay away. This took nutrients out of the soil so that vigorous grass growth didn't crowd out any delicate native wildflowers that might put in an appearance.

Cowslips (primula veris) were brought from our nearby allotment and have flowered well in their first year. Crocus and narcissus have proved successful too, with more to be added ready for next spring.

We are compulsive seed collectors and have distributed the seed of oxeye daisies (leucanthemum vulgare), knapweed (centaurea nigra)  and wild geranium (geranium sanguinium).

yellow rattle seedlings?

And I was delighted to see possible evidence that yellow rattle (rhinanthus minor) seed cast in the summer of last year looks to have germinated. I marked sowing positions with stakes and by each stake we now have similar leaves emerging. Could they be yellow rattle? I hope so, because this plant plays an important part in traditional hay meadows - which is what we are trying to achieve beneath our fruit trees. Yellow rattle is a grass parasite and thus weakens grasses, allowing wild flowers to grow without the competition of coarse grasses.

Two tiny cider apple trees (in anticipation of Cordwood Cider!)


and a greengage have been planted in the spaces left after moribund damson and plum trees were removed. Linda and Trev bought me a Golden Hornet crab apple too, which is in especially good flower, in this, its first spring with us.

We are garlanding our trees with climbers and have planted honeysuckles and roses to scramble through the branches. Not only will these look lovely and add to the charm of the orchard, they will provide a late nectar and pollen food source for insects. We have seen a solitary soprano pippistrelle bat flittering above the apple trees in the twilight. Let's hope that the increasing floral diversity of the orchard provides more food for birds and bats and increases their numbers too.

The weather last year was awful for our venerable apple trees. This late spring sees blossom on each of the trees.

We sat in the orchard today having our lunch, watching a male chaffinch singing in our 'Lane's Prince Albert' apple tree. He was joined in song by a dunnock, a wren and several blackbirds. We remarked on the relaxing qualities of birdsong as our neighbour's motor mower roared into action on the other side of the fence..

camassia leichtlinii alba

I love collecting seeds - there's a special kind of magic with them. All so different but each with the promise of a beautiful plant encapsulated within.

And when they germinate and grow that promise begins to be realised. But, as all gareners will tell you, it is not always easy cultivating that magic and translating the promise of the seed into the fully grown plant. Gardeners have to be good at coping with delayed gratification.

In July 2011 Linda gave us a gift of seed collected from her white camassias (camassia leichtlinii alba). By 27 January 2012 I was reporting on this blog that the seeds had germinated. The seedlings were 'pricked out' into individual modules by dad and nurtured until they became dormant in the autumn.

On Monday we saw with excitement  that the bulblets had survived. Tiny green shoots were pushing through the grit .. and so, onto the next part of their journey.

Camassias enjoy moist soil and so we have planted our baby bulbs in the shaded area of the orchard. Eventually drifts of pure white camassias will follow the flowering cowslips. Hopefully the camassias will bulk up over 2013 and give us our first show of elegant white flowering stems in May of 2014.

Here's a photo of the beautiful blue camassias to be seen at the RHS Wisley Gardens.

cider...

Our old orchard came back, blinking into the sunlight in 2011 and has been recovering ever since.
In 2012 we gave the trees their first pruning and fertiliser for over two decades. Jan has identified one of our venerable trees as 'Lane's Prince Albert' - a Victorian cooker. We think another is an old 'Bramley Seedling' - our county's greatest contribution to orchards across the world. The ground beneath the trees naturally regenerated with grass which we allowed to grow to maturity before taking a hay cut in high summer and then mowing until the autumn.
Bulbs have been planted beneath the trees and transplanted cowslips planted into the grass. Cowslip seed has been broadcast along with that of white camassia and small quantities of yellow rattle.

Climbing roses and a honeysuckle have been planted to grow through some of the older trees.

Now to add some new trees: to celebrate my big birthday I've bought cider apple trees 'Red Foxwhelp' and 'Stoke Red' whilst Linda and Trev generously bought me a 'Golden Hornet' crab apple.

A little while yet before the first glass of Cordwood cider but that's the plan...

I can't wait for the industrial revolution to reach Cordwood...

In April 2011 we entered the area of Cordwood that was to become our orchard and vegetable garden. At that time it was so neglected that even our tree survey had not spotted that there were apple trees here and it was only Google earth images showing blossom that suggested there was anything of interest in this literally impenetrable place.

So, we began the back-breaking toil of digging out tall sapling oaks, suckered and spiny blackthorn and dying cherries all embedded within nettles and brambles. By November 2011 we had cleared the area.

And by August 2012 we have an orchard separated from a vegetable garden by thriving cordoned apples and pears.

Our orchard plan is a long term one. It will take at least two more years to prune the apples into shape.

And it will take as long to begin to establish the grassland beneath the trees as a flower rich grassland. We intend to allow the grass to grow without being cut until high summer. We hope that this will benefit invertebrates and provide food for other animals along the food chain. I disturbed several disgruntled toads and frogs while scything the long grass over the past week but must also report not hearing a single grasshopper. What an indictment of our countryside that even here 'in the middle of nowhere' (as Jaimee-Leigh described it yesterday) grasshoppers do not recolonise seeding grassland. This further reinforces Sheila Wright's point that we have only 10% of the invertebrate life of a hundred years ago.

Over the coming years we will reduce the fertility of the soil by taking an annual cut of hay. Reduced fertility should benefit more delicate flowers that cannot compete against coarse grasses. We also hope to sow grass parasites hay rattle and red bartsia. These will further reduce the vigour of the grasses.

Field scabious and meadow geranium seed we have gathered will be scattered shortly as will non-native white cammasias. Scores of baby cowslips growing on the allotment will be transplanted into the orchard grassland over the coming weeks.

We also hope to plant species crocus for early spring colour and as a vital food source for early flying insects. We hope that these will set seed and become a carpet of colour in the years ahead.

As I have said, I have spent the past week scything the grass and mighty tiring too.... I can't wait for the industrial revolution to reach Cordwood. Especially so since we expect to add significantly to the area of flower rich hay meadow at Cordwood over the coming years.

The cut hay has been turned and allowed to dry before being finished in the polytunnel. It is an indicator of how my life has changed over this past year: I never dreamed I would be looking to the heavens in the hope of averting rain from my precious drying hay!

natures way of controlling grasses in the orchard

Such hard and sometimes dispiriting work. As we clear areas of weeds and move to another section, the weeds spring up behind us. We are chasing our tails...

This last week we have cleared the woodland garden of weeds and scythed the drive. We have scythed paths through the nettles of Picnic Wood and around the boundary and worked to clear the Vegetable Garden of the thousands of seedling weeds that have grown where we have manured the ground. New beds are beginning to appear in the Vegetable Garden while the piles of weeds wait for processing through the compost bins.

Today, while Jill worked in the Vegetable Garden, weeding and planting out Deschampsia cespitisa; Joe-Pye weed (Eupatoreum purpurea); Goldenrod (Solidargo canadensis); Aquilegia chrystanta; Millium effusum aureum; and Molina caeruleum....I concentrated on the orchard.

My Northern Fruit Group notes reminded me that the grass beneath the apple trees is best allowed to grow. This saves work and provides invaluable habitat for invertebrates. But it was little use to us as an impenetrable mass of seeding grasses, so I scythed a path through. Incredulous Steve suggested I charge entrance money for the public to see people working as they would have done one hundred and fifty years ago. In fairness, our petrol mower would have struggled to cut a swathe through the knee high grass and I hope to take the petrol mower through the newly-created path at the weekend.

I then cleared the boundary edges of the orchard where weeds had taken hold.

This work created huge piles of grass and weeds that had to be removed from the orchard. If the cut vegetation were left, it would add fertility to the soil and make the grass grow even more eagerly.

I would love to see meadow cranesbill (Geranium pratense) and field scabious (Knautia arvensis) flourishing here next year but the vigorous grasses need to be controlled before this can happen.

Natures way of controlling the growth of grasses and allowing more delicate flowers to thrive in a meadow is for parasitic plants like yellow (or hay) rattle (Rhinanthus minor)  and red bartsia (Odontites verna) to take hold. They draw the energy from surrounding grasses, allowing other plants to flourish.

So, I sowed hay rattle seed and marked the sown spots with a small post to monitor the success of this strategy next year.

Eighteen hours of gardening between the two of us today ... and still miles to go.

giving log walls that 'lived in' look ....

When we cleared the orchard, my job was to chainsaw the trees and reduce them to manageable lengths. We ended with piles of stacked cherry and recently decided to use them as log walls separating the orchard and the vegetable garden.

The wood may eventually be burned, but while it dries it is great to look at and useful to invertebrates, small mammals and birds.

Here's Mike and Jake building the third of our short walls.

To give it a 'lived in' feel I'm placing little offsets of Sempervivums in the tops of the walls- they'll look great if they establish.

And I've planted ivy cultivars - Hedera helix 'Tripod', 'Ceridwen' and dwarf 'Anita'. Wrens and robins will love chasing small spiders through the foliage as the plants begin to climb the log wall.

privet hedge - gone

To bring power, water and phone lines onto the site, a metre deep trench has been dug that followed the route of the privet hedge which separated the woodland garden and the orchard and vegetable garden.

Privet is an unlovely thing, so we were pleased to see it removed.

And while the privet was being ripped out, the big digger took a quick sidestep and tore out the two cherry stumps left in the vegetable garden that remained from our earlier ground clearance. These stumps concealed a Medusa's head of dense and thick roots that would have been impossible to remove without a machine. And removing these stumps and their roots will now make the creation of our vegetable garden raised beds much more 'do-able'.

But the empty space left by the removal of the privet hedge created a headache. Thankfully, Steve had got the digger driver (also Steve) to use his big bucket and scoop out clumps of birch in the area we hope to use as our flower meadow.

So, on Wednesday, 'the boys' planted nearly fifty seedling silver birches in an informal row. Thanks to Gary, Jim and dad we got the job done in record time.

In the years ahead we hope to move these birch trees to new homes at cordwood and replace them with shrubs and small trees that will form a permanent boundary between these key sections of the garden.



 

a beautiful weekend

A beautiful, dry weekend.

The hen house Roger is building is shaping up nicely. We only have two little bantams - I just hope they don't suffer from agoraphobia in the interior that rivals the O2: there's enough room in here for a mega-flock! Hmmm - there's an idea!!

Mum, dad and Judith built this informal cordwood wall to further separate the vegetable garden and the orchard. The gaps between the logs are great places for wrens to explore.

The orchard is a fine place for a picnic - as you can see. 

another of those 'before and after' posts you've learned to love!

When we took over the Cordwood site, there was a buried orchard that had not been seen for around twenty years.

The apple and cherry trees had been engulfed and we began the long road of restoration in April of 2011.

It took us until November 2011 to clear away the majority of nettles, brambles, suckered blackthorn & cherry and vigorous seedling oaks.

We decided to split this section of the site into two - an apple orchard and a vegetable garden separated by lines of cordoned apples.

It had been our hope to bring pigs onto this part of the site to clear out the determined network of tangled roots, but this never happened. So, it's all been manual labour ..... but here's evidence that the good guys are winning.

Today, Roger got the mower working and cut the grass beneath the apple trees that had established itself since the sunshine had reached the soil. It's coarse and thin and the ground resembled The Somme in parts. But it's looking good!

And Jan, mum and dad and Andrea & Poppy were there too, to see the progress we are slowly making in creating a vegetable garden.

Much, much more work to do, but one of those days when all the months of hard work seem to come together like magic.

grafting apples

The orchard at Cordwood was planted some time after the site was developed around 1947. The trees are probably sixty years old ... and some were in very poor condition when we finally released them from the yoke of choking brambles, blackthorn, oak and cherry that had engulfed them.

We have cleared the ground beneath them, mulched with manure and pruned to reinvigorate them. The trees are all 'standards' and too tall to allow the fruit to be picked easily. They may not respond to treatment and so we have a backup strategy in order that we can retain the heritage of the orchard if the trees have to be removed: grafting.

We bought M9 dwarf rooting stock apple trees and grafted 'scions' or twigs from the old trees onto the dwarf rooting stocks. The warm weather caught us out and the process had to be rushed. It was stressful too, in its own small, unimportant way, cutting V shapes in the scions and marrying them to corresponding  cuts on the dwarf rooting stocks in the  unseasonably hot March sun. Each new graft was bound tightly with raffia and planted in specially prepared ground on the allotment.

This was our first attempt at taking grafts and may not be successful. The scions were a little too dry and the root stocks were just past bud burst .. which is when they should be used for optimum results.

Our hands were so busy during this procedure that we forgot to take photos. Here's the little trees in the ground, rather like a hospital ward for trees, with each having its own bandage.

We will monitor our successes and failures and record results over the coming weeks.

orchard .... nearly there!!

The painstaking, snail's pace progress reinstating the orchard at Cordwood is nearing completion:

• spent from April to November removing the impenetrable build up of suckers, trees and brambles
• pruned the old apple trees
• created overlapping lines of cordoned apples and pears to act as a boundary between the orchard and the vegetable garden
• the ground beneath all old apple trees has been cleared of perennial weeds and suckers
• wood ash and manure has been applied to some of the trees
• a general 'grot-busting' has taken place.

More manure needed, ground needs clearing beneath the knackered damson and plum. And the grass needs cutting to control the blackthorn suckered shoots that are emerging. I hope that one day, the sward in the orchard will become a wild flower meadow, cut once a year in July. And an old-fashioned beehive in pride of place!

Hopefully, all of the outstanding jobs out of the way by the end of the weekend.

And on to the next jobs!!

Too wet for Edison and the girls, but notice dad (84 this year) once again. A Cordwood regular.

january work in the orchard

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
"How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

From Good-Bye, and Keep Cold by Robert Frost

This has been a warm winter so far. Not good for apple trees who want a good cold spell at this time of year. Pruning trees today, some buds were already swelling.

But the mild weather has helped orchard owners this weekend.

We’ve moved ten cordoned apples and pears from the allotment and you can see the first six apple trees in their new homes. The cordons will form a boundary between the orchard and the vegetable garden.

Our thin soil has been enriched with well-rotted manure, compost and wood ash. I hope to give each little tree a topcoat of well-rotted manure as a final mulch.

Next week I hope to move four cordoned apples from Rogers garden, buy more posts and establish a second line of eight cordons set back to provide a hidden, staggered entrance to the orchard.

In the orchard, we’ve given the apple trees the first pruning they have had in years. Being submerged by bramble and blackthorn has not helped these neglected trees and our annual pruning will take at least three years to achieve the results we want. No more than 25% of the branches on each tree should be removed in any year. If a greater proportion is removed, the tree will produce masses of ‘water shoots’ that are unhelpful and leggy twigs.

The perfect apple tree has an open goblet of branches allowing air and light into the centre of the plant. Folklore says that you should be able to throw a hat through the branches of the well-pruned tree.

We also wanted to reduce the height of our trees. Apples are no use if they are too high to be picked!

The mountain of pruned branches was dragged away, but we harvested many twigs (or scions) that we intend to keep cool until we graft them onto new root stocks.

We hope to keep two good old trees from the orchard we have taken over, but we intend to remove the other, less healthy specimens and replace them with more manageable dwarf trees that only grow to head height.

The trees we remove will live on in dwarf form. Their twigs (the scions) will be grafted onto the stems of dwarf root stock trees just as they are about to awake. With luck, these scions will grow to produce vigorous new fruit trees in around three to five years.

preparing the ground for polytunnel and coldframes

A six acre garden that is all wilderness and concrete..... and no budget for landscaping.

The only option before is to think long term and to grow our own garden from seeds, cuttings and divisions.

A necessary part of this madcap scheme is to erect a polytunnel, make cold frames from reused casement windows and to create a fertile and nurturing nursery bed on the root riddled sand that is the former orchard. We will also use our allotment as a further, satellite nursery.

This plan will take three to five years before the gardens begin to resemble anything like our long term vision for the site. I have said before that delayed gratification comes in spadefuls with this project!

We spent from April to September clearing the orchard of its infestation of blackthorn and cherry suckers, oak and other seedlings and vicious tangle of brambles and nettles.

I had hoped that by now we would have had the help of a few pigs to root out the rubbish in the soil and help create the beginnings of a fertile tilth.  That hasn't happened so today I began the slow and heavy job of clearing the soil of roots armed only with a mattock.

Hard work indeed, but the necessary breaks to get my breath back were punctuated by the welcome sound of migratory fieldfares flying south on their journey from Scandinavia. That 'cluck cluck' call high in the sky is such a characteristic winter sound. One fieldfare alighted in a tall birch tree and called for several minutes.

Today I cleared about 30m2  (pictured) which is a small proportion of the ground that will eventually be needed for polytunnel and cold frames.

nottingham's heritage apple varieties

Apples are fussy old pollinators: they are either diploid (needing two pollinators) or triploid (needing three).


So, when you get an apple pip, it will never grow to be exactly like the tree from which it fell snug inside its apple. Each apple pip will produce a tree that is unlike any other. So how do we grow another Bramleys seedling tree is all pips produce trees unlike their parents? The way that we get around this is by grafting buds of the most successful trees onto 'rootstocks' and then we have a perfect clone of the mother tree!

Nottinghamshire's most famous apple (the Bramley seedling) was a good example of this. Found in a Southwell garden growing from a discarded apple pip, buds of the mother tree have been successfully grafted onto rootstocks and then gone on to grow around the world.


This diversity of apple tree seedlings has produced a wide heritage of local varieties and Nottinghmashire has its own unique heritage.

• Askham Pippin
• Domino
• Markham Pippin
• Nottingham Pippin
• Radford Beauty
• Pickering Seedling
• Sissons Worksop Newton
• Bess Pool

They are all unique local apple varieties especially suited to flourishing in our conditions.

I am hoping that St Annes Allotments (who have a heritage apple project) will provide me with some of these from those they grafted from old local varieties on their site.

After that, I must hunt down our local varieties to fill our orchard with trees that reflect the neglected fruit growing traditions of our county.

cherry in smoke

Record high temperatures for the end of September made work at midday especially uncomfortable.

But a big bonfire throughout the day cleared many of the nasty piles of sticks and tangling brambles.

Some of the cleared oak and cherry saplings were too thin for chainsawing but will make excellent poles for supporting beans and climbers. I pointed their ends with a hatchet.

Here is the growing stack, resting against an elderly cherry tree as the bonfire smoke catches the afternoon sunlight.

another day ....

Another of those 'orchard clearance' posts. Today we cleared another patch of stubborn cherry suckers and oak.

The remaining uncleared areas had their undergrowth of brambles and nettles removed and we began to log the felled trees.

Two more clearing sessions will probably see it ... but more work needed to log felled saplings and to support brash stacked against the fence.

Thanks to our dear friends Trev and Linda for muscle - and to Pete for eye protection!!

On the subject of dear friends ... here we have Derek and Pauline clearing the boundary with us on a blustery Monday. Bless you!!!

Our orchard reclamation began in April and we have slowly axed, chainsawed, raked, dug, dragged and burnt our way until we now have around three sessions ahead of us until the orchard is cleared.


With us this weekend were Joy and her boys who made a real difference clearing more cherry suckers and then taking on the difficult task of removing a cherry tree.

Pictured right is the moment that the pushing and pulling finally paid off and the cherry went over. Trev is a lovely mover and extemporises while the rest of us push or put their weight behind ropes.

It is always satisfying to tidy up and we love to end sessions with a calming and reflective bonfire and we see team Hill doing just that.

Orchard reclamation will continue then on to:

• ground clearance to remove roots and suckers
• raising the crowns of the lime trees to allow more light in
• construction of raised beds and filling with hearty topspoil
• construction of compost bins
• removal of privet hedge and replacement with new hedge
• sowing of hay meadow 
• planting of crocus bulbs

Our next working party is on Sunday 18 September 2011. All help welcome. Join us.