Orchard Visit

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We recently hosted 15 people who were interested in seeing our new orchard.  They were from the Tree Council, Natural England, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, four local authorities and Kent County Council, the organisations who funded and administered the Trees Outside Woodland programme that gave us the grant.  

They were a very interesting group of people.  We really enjoyed talking to them and hearing their ideas and advice.  They're welcome back any time!


This is the illustration I (Mandy) did of the various fruit trees we've planted.

It's now framed and was displayed on the day.

We planted:

Apples - Gala, Discovery, Ashmead's Kernel, Cox's Orange Pippin and Bramley Seedling.

Cherries - Sunburst and Stella

Plums - Victoria, Greengage, Opal and Reine Claude d'Oullins

Pears - Conference, Concorde and Bonne Louise d'Avanches 

We're pleased to say all the trees are still alive.  The surprise Discovery apple (from the last blog post) is now ripe and something is enjoying it!  Today we're going to pick it and eat the other half. :)  I'm sure we'll really appreciate our first 'crop from the new orchard.

As we've had dry, sunny weather for several weeks, we're watering the trees.

The dry weather doesn't put off the stinging nettles, brambles and Old Man's Beard from growing so we're also mowing and using a brush cutter.

We planted potatoes and squash in the orchard.  They haven't done so well.  We think we need to improve the soil and water retention.  We have a plan for that using swales, diversion banks and huegel culture.  More on that in a future post . . .




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