We have an orchard!
When I first joined Ellers Farm Distillery back in the summer of 2021, one of the things I was most excited about was the chance to plant an orchard. In addition to being something I’d never done before, I was also thrilled to create something that would have a positive impact on the environment. My enthusiasm, however, did not match my ability. I haven’t had much of a chance to hone my horticultural skills, spending the last decade or so working in offices and living in a city centre flat. The only plants I have much experience with are the houseplants I’ve managed to keep alive. I’m grateful that the team trusted that I would do the research and get the right people involved to make our orchard dreams into a reality.
I began learning as much as possible about apples and orchards. I relied heavily on Common Ground’s Community Orchards Handbook, Sue Clifford and Angela King’s The Apple Source Book and Raymond Blanc’s The Lost Orchard as starting points. In addition to the practicalities of planting, caring for and harvesting apple trees, I wanted to know about the history of apples, their cultural significance and their many culinary uses. I knew I couldn’t limit my research to print alone, so I visited two community orchards here in Yorkshire: The Reeth Community Orchard in Swaledale and the Pickering Road Community Orchard in Hull. The volunteers at both community orchards were incredibly welcoming and graciously shared as much knowledge as they could in the time I had with them.
The three books on apples and orchards I found the most useful for research.
I chose to focus my research on community orchards as they tend to be managed in the way of traditional orchards, with plenty of canopy cover and a carpet of grassland or meadow underneath. Commercial orchards generally pack in as many spindly trees as possible in order to maximise fruit yield. While we want a decent harvest, we also want to create plenty of opportunity for nature to thrive. We’ve commissioned several ecological surveys over the last year so we’ll be able to measure the changes to the land and its inhabitants over time. The best orchards are older and have plenty of mature trees with lots knobbly wood. Even dead and rotting wood has its place as a refuge for insects and small mammals and food for fungi, so I expect we’ll see lots of change for the better in the years to come.
In addition to creating a space for nature, we also wanted to honour the long history of apple cultivation right here on the British Isles. The first apples were brought to the UK along the Silk Road well over 1,000 years ago by the Romans. The Romans would have first encountered apples in the part of the world known today as Syria. Those apples likely grew from seeds dispersed by animals who travelled from the apple forests in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan, the birthplace of all apples. Because the Syrian apples grew from pips (apple seeds), none of the trees growing in that region would have been exactly the same as the trees growing in the Tian Shan mountain range. That’s because every pip in any given apple contains genetic material from the parent tree and other apple trees (via their pollen). So while the fruits grown from pips will have some of the traits of the parent tree, they’ll also share traits with the pollenating tree.
This might lead you, blog-reader, to wonder how supermarket shelves everywhere could have hundreds of the same type apple across thousands of stores. Let’s take the Bramley apple for example. In the UK, we have a lot of Bramley apple trees. In fact, you probably know someone who has a Bramley apple tree in their back garden. According to bramleyapples.co.uk, we eat 350 million Bramley apples in the UK each year. Each and every Bramley apple tree that exists is a clone of the original tree that was grown from a pip in Nottinghamshire garden in 1809. The word “clone” is likely to conjure up futuristic science-fiction laboratories, but cloning apple trees is less like Dolly the Sheep and more like a fruity Frankenstein’s monster. To clone an apple tree, a cutting (also known as a scion) is taken from it and grafted onto the roots of another tree. These roots, also known as rootstock, will determine the ultimate height, spread and vigorousness of the tree’s growth.
A one-year old maiden apple tree. The top brownish stem is the apple tree and the bottom paler stem is the rootstock. The graft is visible above the white label.
There are many more varieties of apples than just the Bramley. In the UK alone, over 2,600 different varieties of apple have been cultivated. Some of these varieties were found growing as one of nature’s happy accidents after an apple pip took root. Others were painstakingly selected through experimenting by cross-pollinating known varieties, in the hopes of combining the best traits of each variety to produce extraordinary fruit.
We’ve managed to incorporate 29 different varieties into our own orchard here at Ellers Farm, with 12 varieties originating in Yorkshire. Our oldest variety, and possibly the one with the cutest name, is Pig’s Snout, which dates back to 1600. We also have some rare Yorkshire varieties like the Acklam Russet, Charlestown Pippin, Flower of the Town, and the Hornsea Herring. Some apples, like Scrumptious or Strawberry Pippin, create a sense of what you’d expect to taste when biting into them. Others have names that allude to a grand origin story, such as Forty Shillings, Howgate Wonder or Nancy Jackson. And sometimes it’s the story behind the apple that really captures the imagination – like Yarlington Mill, found growing wild as a seedling from a discarded pip in the wall of a watermill in Yarlington, Somerset around 1910. How many people must have walked by as this enterprising young apple tree decided to grow from a wall? And who was the first person to try the fruit and think “we should have more of these”?
A bunch of our one-year-old apple trees, ready to be planted.
We sourced all of these apples, and many more, from RV Roger in Pickering. It was important for us to support a local nursery and only plant UK-sourced and grown trees. According to The Woodland Trust, buying trees that have never been overseas is one of the simplest and most effective ways of protecting trees from new pests and diseases. Almost all of the native tree species in the UK have been affected by an introduced pest or disease in the last 30 years. Furthermore, the UK Plant Health Risk Register indicates that there are a further 127 high risk pests and diseases that would have a high impact if introduced. We knew that when the first delivery of trees arrived on the 21st of March, we weren’t putting any of the established trees or woodland surrounding the farm at risk.
Over the course of two days, under the supervision of three tree-planting experts and with the help of 18 volunteers from Portakabin, we managed to get 361 trees safely into the field behind the distillery. Planting trees takes a lot of hard work, so I was certainly grateful to everyone for all their effort. I did significantly less heavy-lifting over the two days, but I did have the task of keeping track of which trees ended up in which holes and I’m happy to say that we have a detailed record.
This photo shows me laying out trees and recording their placement for our records while volunteers do the hard work of getting the trees in the ground just behind me.
Our 29 different apple tree varieties are made up of a mixture of cooking, eating and cider apples – the main criteria was that we get plenty of juice from the varieties chosen. They’ll begin to fruit in the next two years, but we don’t expect to get a large harvest until year five. While the trees are still immature and growing, we’ll trim back the fruiting buds so the plants can direct energy to root production. Having strong, healthy root systems will set the trees up for longer and healthier lives, and set us up for more Dutch Barn Orchard Vodka!
A golden-hour selfie in the freshly planted orchard.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the kind people at Pickering Road Community Orchard and Reeth Community Orchard for their insights on all things orchards. Some of the best resources I’ve used to bolster my knowledge of apples and orcharding are:
· The Lost Orchard by Raymond Blanc
· Community Orchards Handbook by Common Ground
· The Apple Source Book by Sue Clifford and Angela King
· Apples: British to the Core presented by Chris Beardshaw