Blog – Page 4 – Resilient Orchards Cornwall

Join the BioBlitz at Tehidy Orchard

There’s been a 74% loss of traditional orchards across the South West which was home to the largest area of orchards at the beginning of the 20th century. Traditional orchards are well known as fantastically biodiverse spaces and home to rare species partly due to the combination of tree spacing, grass and meadow between fruiting trees. Apple trees also have veteran features earlier than other trees creating gnarly trunks and holes for a diversity of habitats favoured by some species. We need to raise awareness of the importance of traditional orchards for protecting and enhancing biodiversity in our communities as well as for reducing food miles that negatively impact on our environment.

The goal of this Bioblitz project is to increase awareness of the biodiversity of orchards, improve monitoring and identification skills of the general public and get more people involved in community orchards. The project will use the 24hr bioblitz and resulting report as a template and springboard for further biodiversity research within Cornish orchards. The funding will pay for Budding Nature Cornwall- educational and science professionals – to organise, set up and deliver the bioblitz and produce a final report and Resilient Orchards Cornwall CIC to support and coordinate the event.

We aim that the impact of this project will increase knowledge and appreciation for local community orchards; public training and involvement in identification and monitoring of wildlife species; increased involvement in care for and knowledge about traditional orchards; introduce young people to caring for orchards and wildlife. The final report and record of species and biodiversity within this traditional orchard space will be vital evidence for future work on orchards in the area. The report will be disemminated to regional and national orchard, wildlife recording, and biodiversity organisations. It is hoped that any results contained in the report can then be acted on, to support particular species found or found missing. It will also help to kick start more research and sharing of results of biodiversity studies in Cornish orchards. We are also developing a Cornwall-wide Orchard Network, and an event like this and the promotion and dissemination of results will really aid us to do so.

Many thanks to South West Water Community Neighbourhood Fund for funding this project! More details about their scheme here:

Get involved in your local BioBlitz!

Over 24 hours 29/7 – 30/7 at Tehidy Country Park, based in and around the Orchard nr the Rangers Office

Delivered by the Budding Nature team and friends and supported by Resilient Orchards Cornwall & Cornwall Council

Join experts for a series of walks and activities and help us discover as much wildlife as we can in a single day.

Be an expert and see what you can find!

12 noon Friday 29th July until 12 noon Saturday 30th July

Including monitoring, recording, searching, discovering.More info to come, please save the date if you’re interested in coming along or getting involved. https://www.facebook.com/BuddingNature/?ref=page_internal

Summer pruning workshop at Kehelland Horticultural Trust

Why prune in Summer? Why in Winter? Have an overgrown espalier? – July and August is the time to prune espalier trees, when growth is starting to slow down. We will be working in the fantastic espalier orchards at Kehellend Horticultural Trust ‘s 16 acre site. Our aim will be to encourage fruit for next year, let light in for this years developing fruit, check for pests and disease and prune for general health of the tree. We will go through the principles of summer pruning, how it differs from winter pruning and you will hopefully go away more confident with how to look after your own fruit trees. This is the second of a series of orchard management workshops we are offering in partnership with Kehellend Horticultural Trust, so if you want to know more about and try out winter pruning, we hope to offer this again in Jan or Feb 2023.

Sunday 31st July
10.30am -3.30pm

For more information and to book on the workshop go to Kehellend Horticultural Trust website and links to their shop or follow this link. Do a search for ‘pruning’ or ‘workshops’.
Kehelland Trust Food Hub – Open Food Network

Wild apples Cornwall

Blooming wild apple tree in May near Redruth

Those of you who follow the online journal: Apples and People, may have read a recent article about the magnificent project ‘Some Interesting Apples’ that William Arnold and James Fergusson have been conducting the past few years. It’s fantastic to hear about them researching the wild apple trees that surround us, focusing mainly on the miner’s tracks around Redruth and Camborne.

Prior to the development and breeding work for commercial rootstocks, many apple tree growers would use chance seedlings around their farms and countryside to graft onto their chosen varieties. There is a lot to be said about this approach. You won’t end up with neat rows of apple trees all of the same size and breadth and vigour like some might aim for in their orchard. You may not know of the tree’s ability to resist certain plant diseases. But the use of wild seedling trees in particular, also of seed grown apples, can help ensure we are using a diverse range of genetics in our apple orchards that are continually adapting to the current climate and environmental changes.

I’ve been growing apple seeds for several years and similarly investigating how we can diversify our orchards. First by using seed grown apples both for alternate rootstock, but also just to experiment with what apples result. Seed grown trees are obviously much slower than grafted apple trees to reach fruit bearing age but with much more talk about and research into the importance of diversity and resilience in our local food crops there is an obvious concern to be had by all this focus on the same small number of rootstocks used by apple tree nurseries. Wild apple trees and the use of seedlings grown in the wild or by seed seems to be a good additional practice to help create more resilience in our orchards. The other approach is to add more ‘pitcher’ trees in our orchards, those grown on their own roots for example Cornish aromatic, Ben’s Red, Devonshire Quarrendon and Sweet Larks all have the capacity to grow from hard wood cuttings much like you do to propagate currant bushes or a rose bush.

Read more in the article above about how in America wild seedling trees were being used and harvested long ago by Johnny Appleseed, and then how William and James’s hugely useful research into our local wild apple trees and fruit can help us ensure a good genetic diversity for our apples into the future. They may also inspire you to check out your local apple trees, to go scrumping and taste the fruit and then maybe to graft your own variety taken from the wild.

The Orchard Network have a crab apple protect currently in process whereby wild and more formally planted crab apple trees are being logged, monitored and contributing to studies on this very subject.

Another study looking at distribution of wild apples – in particular crab apples Malus slyvestris rather than apples that are seedlings from discarded named apples – took place in Scotland and culiminated in the following write up: Scotland wild apples p21-29 wild apple ecology SF spring-summer 2020.pdf

Orchard abundance amongst the sand dunes at Towans Forest Garden

Raymond & Sylvia Yarwood were aware of what needed to be done to regreen Cornwall way before many of us. Towans Forest Garden is situated on one of Cornwall’s largest sand dune systems in Hayle, in no small way a challenging place to grow fruiting trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals. The garden is tested to the limits with the exposed strong and salty winds from the Atlantic, huge depths of sand underneath with very little topsoil and the prevalence of rabbits and snails – but that hasn’t stopped them!

The forest garden was started way back in 1982, taking inspiration from people such as Robert Hart, one of the pioneers of forest gardening. There is such a huge amount of knowledge in this garden and in Raymond and Sylvia who have managed and developed the site over the years. Not only the planting and growing, but the continuous harvesting, processing and use of the food that grows in the garden, whether it’s apple and autumn olive crumbles, juice and fruit leathers from sea buckthorn berries, or salads using an array of greens including sea radish, bladder campion, wild fennel and small leaved lime.

The template that has been created here is a fantastic inspiration for us all as we try to replicate the idea that we can rewild, re-populate with fruit trees and shrubs, and other tree, shrub and perennial crops in our own gardens – whatever the size – and community spaces using the forest garden & orchard approach. This focus on creating food forests for all will help us to create sustainable spaces and work towards access to food for everyone regardless of income. The approach will also ultimately help improve biodiversity and homes for wildlife.

The wisdom that this is the way forward from years previous is here seen quoted from the Towans Forest Garden website:

We have a significant area of dunes here in West Cornwall that could be restored by settling young people into forest gardens…there would be a degree of self sufficiency with suitable surpluses to develop new products.. With the popularity among employers of offering limited work contracts the original investment in these small farms would help to provide participants with a sense of future and also if extended to former mining waste areas of which we have many throughout Cornwall we should have the added advantage of re-greening the County.
Restoring the coastal forest, written by Raymond Yarwood Restoring the Coastal Forest (towansforestgarden.co.uk) accessed on 11.4.2022

I’ve been particularly interested in the various other top fruit that have been thriving here including Crataegus varieties such as schradiana and arnoldiana, to the many sea buckthorns, and the abundance of Eleaegnus species. Having such diversity of fruits, nuts and other plants and their products in our orchards will help maintain them as sustainable, resilient spaces. We need to experiment with growing new fruits, older fruits, fruits from different climates, all of this helps set us up for increased resilience but also, as Raymond says above, provides people with a sense of the future and a ‘degree of self sufficiency with suitable surpluses to develop new products’. What a great prospect!

Do check out the website for further information about this fantastic forest garden:
towansforestgarden.co.uk

Apple trees for the community

We’ve had a good first season of providing fruit trees for planting in public spaces. Some Cornish apple trees including ‘Cornish Gillyflower’ made there way to Tehidy Country Park as part of the Apple Tree event held on 25th February over Half Term and organised by Charlotte Evans, and rangers Gavin and Stuart all from Cormac. We heard from Tehidy volunteer Andrew Tompsett in the Orchard all about grafting and pruning apple trees and then went on to plant apple trees in the events field. More can be read about the event here.

Portreath Pre School also got in touch seeking advice on planting an apple tree in a container for the children to follow the seasons of the apple tree – from buds, to flowers and leaves opening and then, in time, to see the apples growing too. Fortunately, we had just the tree! The ‘Pendragon’ apple tree had been grafted two years ago from wood that came from a tree at St Ives Community Orchard. As the pre-school already had a resident dragon looking over the garden it was a perfect match. As it’s a couple of years old, hopefully it won’t be too long before they can see it fruiting. It’s an interesting variety as it’s got red flesh inside, so that will be an exciting surprise come harvest time!

Planting apple trees in suitably sized containers is fine if large enough and you have the ability to water them in dry periods. You’d think that a very dwarfing variety would be the natural choice, but as these have been bred and chosen for their ability to be restricted and smaller thus inducing earlier fruiting and less vegetative growth it means they’re already under stress and more stress in the form of less access to water in the ground, as is likely in a container, as well as restricted roots, this will just result in more stress and possibly failure of the tree. Therefore, choosing a more vigorous tree is considered more appropriate. We chose an M26 tree as this is what was available at the time, but we could have equally gone with an MM106. We added John Innes no. 3 to the existing soil and compost, using plenty of soil, rather than all compost is preferred as it’s less likely to dry out too quickly.

Most important will be watering during the growing season from when you see it come into growth until the end of the season and it returns to fill dormancy. Give the roots of the apple tree a good watering every two weeks, or more during very sunny or hot periods.

More information about growing apple trees in containers here.

Finally, we’ve also got some apple trees lined up for East End Park in Redruth, planted another apple tree along Primrose Terrace community garden in Portreath, and a few more will be going in public spaces too.

That brings us to the end of this tree planting season! Fingers crossed we have plenty of grafting success so we have more to plant next year.

What a productive start to the year! March Update

We led 4 x grafting workshops this year with 37 participants grafting and going home with at least 1 apple tree to care for and if successful – fingers crossed – plant in the Autumn. That’s 37 new apple trees to be planted!

Incredible Edible Helston invited us to their edible community garden to share the skills of grafting in an open community workshop. A full detailed write up can be found on the Helston Climate Action blog. A further session was held at Redruth Victoria Park, at Food Troops Community Kitchen and garden – do go and check out this wonderful new space.

We also grafted further apple trees to ensure a selection of sizes and varieties suitable for the Cornish climate ready for community orchards at the end of the growing season. Please get in touch if you want to order any trees for Autumn/Winter planting.

Some of the apple trees we grafted last year have been provided to local community groups and organisations including apple trees to Cormac Ltd for a Community Planting Event on 25th February at Tehidy Country Park; to Portreath Pre school where they planted a Pendragon red fleshed apple (!) and some are heading to Redruth East End Park for a community planting day taking place over the Easter holidays.

Orcharding in the community – in numbers
10 apple trees planted by over 20 members of the community with more still to be planted
37 people learning grafting skills and taking home an apple tree
Over 30 more apple trees grafted and earmarked for community orchards for next Autumn
12 participants learning about pruning at an all day orchard pruning workshop and a further 6 participants at a community orcharding session
5 people learning pruning skills on the job whilst we provided general pruning services.
5 apple trees given away to be planted by individuals at home
That’s a pretty productive community orcharding period!

Orchard management services
We continue to provide general orchard management services to individuals or organisations including pruning, design and advice and have worked at a number of fascinating orchards over the past two months.

Creating climate-resilient orchards
We’re also growing some other top fruit trees to help diversify our orchards in the coming years – Sorbus domestica or True Service trees have small to medium sized fruits – depending on the tree – which, similar to medlar fruits, need to be bletted before ready for use. Read more

Apple pressing in the community
Thanks to recent funding from local councillors we now have funds to purchase a community apple press which we plan to take out to community venues in Autumn – please get in touch if you’d like us to visit your group, school or organisation as we develop this project for Autumn 2022.

Community Orchards
We are building relationships with organisations who wish to plant orchards on their community grounds but need support with making it happen whether it’s advice, practical skills or trees. Please get in touch to chat about how we could support your project.

True Service trees (Sorbus domestica)

I’m very excited to be growing True Service trees from seed this year – my first seedlings are growing well. True Service trees grow very large and I’m more familiar with them in London, at St Ann’s Hospital site in Tottenham where there are some amazing mature trees with huge amounts of fruit, usually left to rot on the ground. However, they apparently also thrive in Cornwall and one seemingly wild tree was found on a cliff edge on the Upper Camel Estuary according to references found and shown on the Rowans, Whitebeams and Service Trees blog. The trees have self seeded close to the site in Tottenham and also some seedling trees from seed from the site have been planted in orchards close by including Lordship Rec Orchard, Tottenham. The fact that they seem so easy to grow from seed led me to give it a try this year too, so I got to eat the yummy soft bletted fruit and use the seed too.

Thanks to some long standing community fruit enthusiasts and harvesters Urban Harvest working around north London, these True Service Trees are now a little more known in the area, and celebrated, though still the fruit remains largely unharvested on the floor and generally is quite rare and planted as an ornamental. Thanks to Gemma, from Urban Harvest UK, for championing these fruits and trees and also maintaining really useful resources about the sorb fruits from 2010 on their now defunct, but extremely useful website.

Whilst they’ve been on my radar for a while I’ve only just got around to growing some from seed which I hope to plant out in Cornish orchards in future years.

The True Service tree, Sorbus domestica, is also known as whitty pear, or sorb tree. The fruit needs to be ‘bletted’, like medlar fruit, and is soft and delicious to eat. It can apparently be cooked into a nice syrup too, see the link below.

Do you grow True Service trees in Cornwall? Have you come across any wild ones? Use the fruit? – please get in touch!

Useful resources from Urban Harvest UK website:
Making syrup from ripe (bletted) sorbs
Comparison of the sorb fruits from 15 different trees at St Ann’s Hospital site, Tottenham, N17

Grafting Workshops March 2022

Redruth
Location: Food Troops Community Kitchen & Garden at Victoria Park, Redruth (the horticultural greenhouses behind the bowling green)

Monday 14th March 10am-1200

Follow link to book, or contact us to pay by cash on the day
Make your own apple trees: Bench Grafting Tickets, Mon 14 Mar 2022 at 10:00 | Eventbrite

Learn the traditional skill of fruit tree grafting used to propagate fruit trees. You’ll have plenty of chance to practice a few different grafting methods and go home with your own grafted apple tree. We’ll have a couple of rootstock sizes to choose from.

Please bring your own secateurs if you have them.
£5 for all participants including take away apple tree.

Thank you for the support from Redruth Town Council for the funding, and Food Troops CIC for collaborating on this workshop and the use of the workshop space; and also Cormac Ltd who manage the space.

More info and to book a place.

Update Feb 2022

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.

Community Orchard at Tehidy Country Park

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.

‘Own root’ apple trees

‘Own root’ apple tree multistems regrown from the fallen original

It’s hard to see from this photo, but this is a multi stemmed apple tree which orignally fell some time ago – fallen apple trees being a common sight in Cornwall. It has regrown from where it fell at several points, creating it’s own new root systems completely disregarding the original rootstock it had previously grown on.

This has happened because some west country apple varieties can be grown as ‘pitchers’ or as ‘own root’ trees. Other apple trees cannot do this and need to be grafted. ‘Own root’ trees can be grown from cuttings taken now when carrying out annual pruning.

The draw backs with own root trees are that the final size and vigour of the tree will vary depending on the variety and the pest and disease resistance will vary too. In contrast, the vigour and disease resistance of known traditional rootstock size, onto which a tree is normally grafted, has been bred and sold commercially due to these particular characteristics and therefore are known and usually chosen for this reason. If a tree has fallen and regrown on it’s own roots – as in the orchard above where we were pruning this month – then the tree may outgrow it’s space more quickly if of great vigour than the original rootstock. The size will impact the other trees surrounding it and also your ability to harvest the fruit. The final size will be dependent on the variety but could be up to the size of a wild crab apple tree – say up to 8-10 metres tall. But equally

However, there are many benefits to having one or two own root apple trees in your orchard. Grafting obviously creates a weaker tree in some ways, as you are splicing two trees together, the resulting wound does create some stress on the tree. Growing an own-root tree will generally result in a healthier and stronger apple tree without this area of weakness created through grafting union. Mary Martin and James Evans, of ‘A Cornish Pomona’ have been experimenting with ‘own root’ trees for some years and the range of characteristics of vigour or pest and disease resistance varies between the varieties.

There is more information on this fascinating topic researched by Hugh Ermen on the Orange pippin website and also here at an apple farmer website.