Category: Work days

The Community Orchard is maintained all year round by a hardworking group of volunteers. As Orchard members, we all get a share of the apples and soft fruit and in return we help to look after the trees and soft fruit beds. There’s always jobs to do for all ages and abilities. Whether you like grass cutting, weeding, scything or just pottering around, everyone’s efforts help to make the Orchard a beautiful, productive space.

Recently our focus has been the Winter pruning, however, now the weather is warming up, there will be lots of grass cutting and weeding too.

Our work session dates can be found on the ‘What’s On’ page. Why not wander up and have a look to see what’s involved. If you arrive at coffee time, then we are always happy to share cake!

Members of the Orchard meet to continue the winter pruning of the apple trees. They worked on the forest garden area at far end of the orchard. Unfortunately some of our apple trees have canker and we had to remove one of the trees.

Pruning will continue during the next few work sessions.

We have to prune our apple trees twice a year to maintain the health of the trees and encourage crops and growth. This time we were under the expert eye of one of our members, who lead a masterclass in pruning techniques for our other members. Despite the hard efforts there is still plenty of pruning left to do if you want to help at our next work session.

This year we have had a bumper apple crop. With so many apples to pick from our productive trees we needed lots of members to help! We spent a busy day harvesting the apples. Some were packed for members to collect to eat and some were turned into delicious apple juice. We now have a new apple press which came in very handy.

Now that Spring is approaching there is still lots of work and maintenance to be done. Chris Davis led our session. First he pointed out that some of our apple trees have a disease called canker. This is very damaging to our apple trees and can easily spread. Chris pointed out examples and explained how to deal with it. This involves cutting away the affected parts of the tree. If any members visiting the orchard see canker on the trees, please let Chris know.

Chris also lead a quick demonstration on pruning before the orchard members began pruning our apple trees.

And finally… our soft fruit bed received a well needed prune.

Hay making is once more upon us! Members meet on a lovely sunny September morning to wield the scyths. The forest garden also received some care and attention ready for the winter.

Our work mornings have continued throughout the summer and a big thank you to everyone who has turned up to cut grass, weed, edge fruit beds and prune the trees. Some of our younger orchard members have been a great help weeding the forest garden.

We are always delighted to welcome new members. There are so many ways to join in and become part of the community orchard. If you would like more information please visit our contact page or download a membership form which can be found on the Orchard page.

Our latest work morning was held on a chilly but sunny April morning. It was too damp to start the grass cutting, however, there was plenty of weeding to do in the fruit beds and new forest garden.

Please don’t think that it’s all gardening though. Coffee breaks are a good time to get together and someone usually brings along something home baked to share. This time it was cream scones and Jostaberry Jam, made with Orchard jostaberries from last summer.

If you enjoy gardening and home baking why not join us on our next work morning to find out more. Please see the ‘What’s on’ section of our website for the work morning dates.