Apples past and present

an apple a day keeps the doctor away..

It was apples this week. We have two apple trees that when I first moved into the cottage James had been given as a present by his friends Mr M and Daddy D - Mr M is a a tennis playing herbalist who seems to have become a country househusband of late fair play to him and Daddy D is the most handsome, smooth faced black haired Welsh yet London city slicker of a man you could meet, I like to get him to say Portmerion in a deep Welsh accent. 

Anyway we digress, back I’m afraid dear readers to this gift of apples that I believe are Braeburns. They have been good this year, getting on to be probably 7 years old.  Last year, I treated them to being planted (at great expensive) into two very big terracotta pots that came via the lovely Tom at Toms yard. If you want big Cretan, frost proof terracotta pots then Tom is your man . He delivers them too.

 Tom's yard pots

It’s amazing how much more the two trees have grown since being given these pots that stand at some two and a half foot tall and must be about 1 and half ft wide, I think! Filled with more farmyard muck than compost and watered well despite all the rain this summer , they have produced this year,  their first proper crop of apples.

Being terracotta , I lined the sides of these pots before filling them with old compost bags to help the compost retain its moisture; terracotta otherwise is very porous and soaks up moisture with ease as quickly as plants roots can. Of course, before the apples comes the blossom and so fruit trees make such worthy plants for small gardens. A canopy must not be over looked , a pot of tulip bulbs will only last a season often , a small tree may in comparison last a lifetime.

 

Those apples that have dropped and bruised I have cut in half and left on the ground. These are for the black birds and the rest I have picked. They smell beautiful. The ones in the co-op you don’t bother to smell but these smell beautifully. The scent reminds me of childhood. To be fair to the co-op not that one needs to be given their stance on not implementing the better chicken commitment, they do at least seem to be well stocked with British apples for most the year.

Picking wet apples with my Nan Min. In her garden, she had several apple trees and when I was little when winters felt so much more of a trusting season of mittens we would pick and gather them. The ice dawn mornings when I stayed with her most weekends would see the trees be alive from the kitchen window with blushed red field fares adoring their branches like elegance Vintage baubles. Nervous Giants among thrushes that clacked and feasted on the apples before moving on with their migration.

You seldom see them now, in Nottingham these days, just a pair or so visit rather than a flock now despite the apple trees remaining at my Nans - my dad went onto inherit her house so they are thankfully safe. That reads as a much grander tale than it is! its a detached two bed house in case anyone now thinks I have an ancestral period property to look forward to myself, alas not.

The apple trees in the neighbouring garden that belonged to old neighbour Ernie who’s endless health conditions gave him the complexions of a Turkey stag have not been as fortunate, few remain. His garden left untended for decades until recently, was a butterfly rich nettle bed with a wild canopy of apples above them for many years until he died. Despite the apple trees here never being pruned they seemed to always crop superbly. Nannar would encourage me and my brother Lyndon to go scrumping as all the apples fell to the floor otherwise. And so we would embark on a Peter rabbit scene of worthy avoidance of Ernie seeing us pushing through the back of the hedge with our buckets secretly with some worry of being caught.

Min, my nan would make lots with the apples with a particular wondrous talent for making these apple muffins but the juice was the most beautiful nectar. She had an amazing juicer a proper no thrills sort that could eat up an apples core with gusto. And so we would make litres of apple juice. It was incredible, with a froth like that of beer! It must have been so good for us too. 

What’s nice about the apple trees in their posh terracotta pots is that they have been underplanted with sprigs of Alchemilla Mollis from my nan Min’s garden and so when I picked these apples she was very much there. That’s the beauty of plants unlike us they do if nurtured grow forever and for those of us who notice and take them to our hearts they carry memories, tears but also mercifully smiles too. 

Last week,  as a final note about apples, we visited the marvellous Hardwick Hall which is about 15 minutes from Chesterfield station. There beneath the more glass that walled house is a wonderful orchard and it was nice to see that the apples of several wonderful old varieties with their names had been gathered and left for visitors to take and taste. It was a beautiful day and in the orchard sat a bee hive with its workers quite busy in the October sunshine. Windfalls saw butterflies appear too. An Aztec gold like creation of a comma, settled down to suck up the fermenting nectar juice from one in the grass flirting and flitting it’s wings in the afternoon sun.

 

It’s always liable to be cold at Hardwick as it sits high so always take an extra jumper if you visit! The day after at nearby Chatsworth, my friend Glenn Facer who stupendously grows the vegetables in the kitchen garden gave me a more exotic treat in the form of a Passion flower fruit. A unsurprisingly tender vine for Derbyshire. Glenn grows them in the greenhouses and here they flourish being cosy in the raised brick beds and growing up and then all over the inner triangular shaped glass eves . The smell of a cut one at home is incredible, sweet exciting and exotic of a golden frogspawn like contents, putting the ones flown in for the supermarkets unsurprisingly to absolute shame. So if you have a greenhouse, perhaps consider adding to it an edible passionflower.  

Now is the season to be planning and then planting apple and fruit trees as bare root saplings. A great many are available like this and they are cheaper than being bought in pots. Mulched well and then watered as they settle in through their first summers they will establish well. You can order some wonderful old varieties from Chris Bowers and Sons, who have one of the best selections it seems. chris Bowers and Sons fruit trees