Apple tree grafting with communities in St Day, St Agnes & North Redruth
We offer opportunities to learn green skills that help to contribute to creating more sustainable communities. Grafting is an ancient skill which allows us to reproduce more trees of the variety that we like, for practically nothing. The skill empowers us to grow trees that have local provenance rather than bringing them in from many miles away. Cornwall has a long history of orcharding heritage and a number of apple tree varieties from mining villages feature in the ‘Cornish Pomona‘, a book that lists a collection of regional varieties found in Cornwall by Mary Martin & James Evans. Many of these varieties do well in our climate & conditions. Some of these varieties could be a legacy provided by our mining past when workers walked to and from the mines and tossed their apple cores.
Cornwall Community Foundation & Cornish Lithium supported our project to spread these orchard heritage skills to people living in mining villages around Redruth: St Day, St Agnes and North Redruth. The result will be more apple trees (100 apple trees were grafted!) from local provenance planted around these locations for the benefit of wildlife and local people. Not only that, but the skills & knowledge acquired can be used elsewhere by individuals and hopefully support further interest in our Cornish orchard heritage, ‘grow your own’ culture and the creation of sustainable communities.
Students at St Day school learnt about grafting apple trees and went on to graft their own tree which, once grown-on, will be planted in the school grounds as well as around the village. Thanks to Shelley a local orchard enthusiast and Karen from United Downs Environment Group for supporting this workshop.
In St Agnes, two groups of adults learnt about grafting and took away one or two trees they had grafted themselves. Here we grafted some ‘Tommy Knight’ a local variety which is a small, red popular dessert apple. We used both whip and tongue grafts and cleft grafts depending on the size of the rootstocks and scion wood. Thanks to Sally Pyner from Kehelland Trust for facilitating and sharing her grafting skills at this workshop.
At Trenoweth Community, North Redruth we have continued to meet regularly on Sundays 11-1pm to care for the existing trees thanks to this funding. This Winter some Cornus species went in plus some productive elderberry varieties, chokeberries and further jostaberries too.