Our Orchard

Bringing nature back to life

Our focus is on producing a diverse range of premium products utilising the renewable resources of our orchard on a sustainable basis, sharing the orchard’s bounty with its environment, through the encouragement of Bio-Diversity, on a low carbon platform of good practice by:

• Working in harmony with the seasons.
• Creating log piles to encourage invertebrates and amphibians.
• Standing deadwood is untampered with wherever safe to do so.
• Leaving corridors of scrub and trees in their wild form, along with boundary hedgerows, so as to provide valuable habitat for wildlife.
• We do not use herbicides, pesticides, or external fertilizers.
• There is no tilling of the land.
• Low soil compaction
• Natural waste from fruit and wood processing is returned to the orchard floor as nutrients and mulch
• Sharing the orchard’s bounty with its natural residents

Harmony with nature

Glades of grasses, weeds and flowers are left uncut from March until late July and now we have:

• A dramatic increase in flora and fauna, thus supporting larger numbers of wild birds: robins, sparrows, finches, pheasants, woodpeckers, rabbits, deer, foxes
• Bees, butterflies, dragonflies and fungi

Our history

The orchard had been left to go derelict for over forty years.

• Although 10.54 acres in size, one could not see a single apple tree, as they were smothered in bramble, dog rose, scrub, weeds and wild apple.
• Seven years later, we are still clearing scrub to release our heritage fruit trees for restoration.
• With a few acres still to do, that have yet to be set foot in.

Restored apple trees

Semi-pruned standard apple trees.

The fruit bearing canopy has been left mainly intact.

• The low horizontal branches, which may cause the trunk to split, have been removed.
• Harvesting is very much a competition with the wildlife, but there is plenty to go round.

The advantages of semi-pruning:

• The tree is not shocked.
• There are no fruit loss years.

Earth

Natural decomposition of wood enriching the earth floor of the orchard.