We shall be providing regular updates to record what we’ve been up to – Welcome to our first update!
We’ve been very busy throughout January and now into February 2022 pruning orchard trees and individual apple trees, surveying orchards, planning, networking, researching and supporting volunteers at work sessions at community orchards.
Pruning
We’ve been lucky enough to work at some fantastic garden orchards to prune the trees and offer advice on their ongoing management. At one orchard near Launceston a large number of the trees have at one point or another fallen over. But some of the resulting trees have regrown on their own roots. This creates a slight dilmemma to the orchard owner and orchardist about whether to let them grow on, and on how to prune them with awareness that they will grow much more vigorously than the original rootstock provided. If planted in an orchard with other trees, these ‘own root’ trees might therefore swamp some less vigorous or younger trees so decisions need to be found about this. There are benefits to growing apple trees on their own roots. I’ve created a separate post about ‘own root’ trees here.
We also helped out with pruning at Tehidy Country Park alongside the fantastic regular Cormac volunteers and will be heading to St Ives Community Orchard next weekend.
Orchard skills workshops – Pruning & Bench grafting
We’ve also been planning some orchard skill-based workshops to include a pruning workshop in February in partnership with Kehellend Horticultural Trust, a grafting workshop with Helston Incredible Edibles in March, a grafting workshop at St Ives Community Orchard and hopefully also one in Redruth too this year. All information about these can be found on the workshop page. We hope to offer summer pruning workshops and more planting workshops next Autumn.
New Redruth Community Orchard
We’re still in discussion about a Redruth Community Orchard, but getting ever closer. Watch this space or get in contact to find out more.
Community Resources
We have secured funding for a new community apple press and scratter that we hope to take out into the community in Autumn in the Redruth – Portreath – Camborne areas initially. If you would like us to run an apple pressing session do get in touch.
Subscribe to our news and updates
We also now have a way of subscribing to our updates and news by entering your emails. Please see the subscribe option below. Updates will be at most once every two months. If you have any orchard news relevant to the potential subscribers of this bulletin please do get in touch, we’d be happy to include orchard related jobs, community orchards seeking volunteers, any interesting features or news about orchards in general.
Mentoring
We have been receiving some fantastic mentoring via the School for Social Entrepreneurs in Cornwall which ‘supports Social Entrepreneurs to realise their ambitions and create social change’.
This experience has already helped to cement ideas about our work and what we want to achieve and focus the CIC on areas to develop that could have most positive impact in our communities. Obviously we exist because we want to see more community orchards, more people with orchard related skills so each community can look after them effectively for the future. Orchards in every community provide not only apples, pears and other fruit for everyone – for free – but they also create social spaces, places to learn together, places to relearn skills that have been lost and skills which will help all of us build resilient communities and food resources for the future.
It is very clear how orchards in our communities can have an uplifting effect on the local people and area and bringing people together is an aspect of our work we’d like to explore in the future, including how we can work with older people.
Thank you to:
Tr1cycles bike shop in Portreath for providing us with spare used inner tubes for us to use as tree ties – the perfect resource for the job and allowing us to reuse and repurpose.
Cormac Ltd Rangers at Tehidy Country Park for allowing us to come in and help work on the orchard and organsing the bark mulch for volunteers to put round the younger trees.
Kehellend Horticultural Trust for supporting our orchard ambitions and working with us to provide orchard skills workshops.