Plum job!

Great news! Tescos have officially declared they no longer want to build a link-road through the Orchard. And can you blame them? Our Orchard now has Management, a Constitution, and its own pedestrian crossing.

More to the point, it's bursting at the seams with delicious fruit: plums are good-to-go and there are lots of windfall apples and pears lying around (though these are better for hand-to-hand combat than for actual eating at the moment). Four of us met up there for a fruit-picking session, armed with a small step-ladder and one of these:
I was only there for about 20 minutes and came away with 14 kg of fruit (to put this into perspective, that's about 1/4 of Lunchista's body weight). And this doesn't include the several bags full that made their way to the Sustainability Committee's stall at the local show, where they were given away to anyone within earshot, most of whom, on coming a little closer to see what was going on, said "Well I never knew that was there!" (or variations thereof).

This is just as well: Lunchista has it on good authority that there's a chance that, like Terminator, Tescos might be back...

The Bees' Knees

Last night, at the Annual General Meeting of the wonderful Local Nature Reserve, we got to hear all about Bees. Bees are in: the very thought that they might all disappear has got everyone, well, buzzing.

It turns out that the centre of our nation's bee-research is just down the road from here, at the enigmatic FERA which, to avoid complication, was known as the CSL until, ooh, probably last month sometime. FERA run a set of hives for research, will pay to borrow other beekeepers' hives to collect information, keep a map of all beekeepers willing to register on it and run an Agony Aunt service for people whose bees appear to be in distress. They're the people to ring up if your bees develop anything notifiable, and what's more they allegedly have 5 tonnes of honey in buckets round the back that they don't quite know what to do with.

Life, it seems, is pretty damn tough if you're a bee. Spending all day collecting nectar that ends up being eaten by someone else, except when it's raining in which case you're probably spending all day wishing you were out-and-about in the fresh air but don't dare to because there are water-bombs the size of your torso hurtling down fit to flatten you. Summers with too many rainy days will result in either outright starvation, or in some blight that'll hit you while you're down.

The one that most people have heard of is Varroa, which is a type of mite. Except that on a bee it's a bit like being stuck with a 10 kilo leech all day (and still having to work). Incredibly, bees seem to be able to learn to clean up their hives to get rid of it. Then there's the delightfully-named "American Foul Brood", which is not a bunch of loudmouthed spoiled brats in baseball caps but some kind of bacterium, whose presence in the UK is declining because any hives in which it is found have to be destroyed. In case you think Lunchista is displaying a spot of Usophobia here, I'll add that there is also European Foul Brood.

What with all these blights on the loose, there appear to be no honey-bees left in the wild: in days of yore if you fancied a spot of beekeeping you simply put up frames in your garden and waited for a bunch to move in. Nowadays you have to troll off and buy them. Lunchista would find this very sad, but for an interesting thought.

As I went to thank the Sydney Morning Herald for the picture I used for this post, I read the article from which it was lifted. Bees, it would appear, are a bit more brainy than we have previously given them credit for. Most of the transmission of bee diseases is the result of careless handling by humans: infected imported Queens (not the sort that were singing earlier on) contaminated kit and the like. Given the choice of having, or not having, to give up a large proportion of their lunch, and having, or not having, the attendent risk of all the above-mentioned blights, any bees still remaining in the wild may simply be keeping a low profile.

You could call it the sting in the tail.

The Orchard Squad

I'd not been looking forward to yesterday's date with the Orchard: the prospect of wielding a mattock to uproot unwanted vegetation in 32 degree heat is a bit too TenKo for Lunchista's tastes!

As luck would have it, though, heavy rain on Friday had taken the edge off the heat, as well as promising to make the digging a bit easier. I arrived at eleven, and headed for the usual hole in the fence. The contrast in atmosphere, going from the road into the orchard, is striking: suddenly the air smells of flowers, trees and grass. On a day like this, just after a night of heavy showers, you can even sense both temperature and humidity changing as you walk the length of the site. Towards, in fact, a bunch of unfamiliar faces, who turn out to be Ecologists (what, I wonder, is the collective noun for Ecologists?).

They are busy explaining the importance of elderly trees, with their gnarled and leaky bark, for the local insect life. It turns out that trees, just like people, can have burst veins, and in fact you could see sap leaking out of some of them: stuff which would keep insects ticking over in the absence of their more usual fare of pollen and the like. The tree, meanwhile, can cheerfully go on producing fruit. Within minutes the team had produced a rare type of Longhorn Beetle, plus another rare beetle whose name, sadly, has slipped Lunchista's memory. A woodpecker could be heard in the trees: given that nobody in the Animal Kingdom is daft enough to waste energy looking for food that isn't there, I think we can safely assume that the bird in question had detected something in the bark and was on to a good lunch.

Talk then turned to what to do about all the stuff growing between the trees: there are still a lot of nettles and "the wrong kind of grass". It turns out, paradoxically, that the best thing to do with the spaces in between the trees is to pull minerals out of the soil, so that meadow-type things can grow there (it also turns out that the UK is short of this type of landscape: a lot of it was lost in the effort to keep ourselves fed, as a besieged island, during the war). Meanwhile the trees, with their deep roots, apparently remain untroubled by all this superficial activity, and in fact this is how orchards were managed in the past. The Ecologists even pointed out the usefulness, to someone like an insect who can't regulate their own temperature, of the temperature changes I had noticed earlier. For a given level of desired activity, you can simply move to the patch with the temperature that suits.

And so we need a Management Plan: one idea was to sow Barley between the trees for three years running, not so much to give us beer as well as cider (although that would be entertaining!) but to deliberately impoverish the top layer of soil, leaving the way clear for the meadow grasses.

And we can't hang about. It transpires that Tesco still has us in its sights...