Apple day success

[Mr Potato Head]

Well over two thousand visitors flocked to the apple event at Ken Muir’s Honeypot Farm nursery in Weeley Heath, Essex, over four days from 20-23 October 2006.

The big event which has been held for the past five years is a real showcase for apples and featured some 130 different varieties. Also on show, however, was a fascinating range of pears and many less common fruits such as medlars, quince, crab apples and also nuts.

Visitors were again invited to take part in a taste test to find the most popular variety of apple for flavour. This year the favourite apple was the heritage variety ‘Pixie’ which just pipped the frontrunners of the past few years, ‘Winter Gem’ and ‘Herefordshire Russet’.

Did you attend this or any of the other apple days this year? Tell us about them...

[Alison]

I didn't, which is a pity as I have several large fruit trees probably over a hundred years old and we don't know what varieties they are. I must look out for them next year. Is there one in Ryton?
Utterly agree about Pixie. We planted a tree which must be about 4 years old by now; it has been our most successful apple this year, is storing like a dream and is delightfully crispy and delicious.
Alison.

[Jea]

I wasn't able to attend an 'apple days' (hope to next year as we're not far from Ken Muir's nursery)but we have a farm shop locally which sells fruit of lots of the old apple varieties.
We have just purchased four 'heritage' apple trees with Suffolk / East Anglian connections for the community plot on our allotments (we won the 'KG Best Community Allotment Project' - see December issue) - varieties are St Edmund Pippin, Lady Henniker, D'Arcy Spice and Monarch. When collecting them, we also saw some Medlar trees, so we got one of those too.
We already have a couple of apple trees on the community plot and although I don't know the variety, I think they are a heritage variety; they produce a small green apple, but lots of them, and the verdict of the pupils (regular visitors to our allotments from the nearby school for children with special and additional needs) who visited at the end of October and took some back with them, was that they were 'really yummy' (I think so too) - and can they have some more next year - they most certainly can, and we hope that our St Edmund Pippin just might have some fruit in 2007, as its a three year old tree.

[Colin_M]

I didn't realise there had been an initiative to do this, this year. However it explains why my village (Frampton Cotterell, near Bristol) had an "Orchard Day" back in October.

Part of the fun of this was that most people didn't realise the village even had an orchard - it was just a patch of land with lots of overgrown trees on it. Whether this will now encourage us to co-operatively cultivate & nurture it in the future, we'll have to see.


Colin