Army Catering

In reviving any neglected Orchard, there comes a time when you have to admit that some of the trees are leaning over, falling over, dead in parts or simply overshadowing themselves. For most fruit-trees (but not plums or almonds) that time is now, when they are fast asleep and no sap would get lost. So we had to take the bull by the horns (or at least the saw by the handle) and make a start on pruning the poor trees into shape. Our chief Orchardista had decided to make a day of it by inviting the local fruit-tree expert to give us an illustrated pep-talk in the morning (in the delightful and newly-redecorated Social Hall), after which we could all have a spot of lunch and then head out with our "implements of Destruction" and do our worst.

On finding out that the Social Hall kitchen would be at our disposal, Lunchista offered to make soup. Then it transpired that 30 people had expressed interest in coming along. Which meant Army Catering: my favourite kind! Especially when there's any kind of project in the offing as well.

At the back of the largest cupboard in Chateau Lunchista's kitchen there lurks a giant stainless-steel saucepan: I think it holds 10 litres but I've never bothered to measure it, because the inside kind of expands into the fourth dimension, and whatever gets made in it there always seems to be plenty to go round. It was originally bought for making Elderberry Syrup, but it has also been used for making puree and preserve with previous fruit from the Orchard.

Out it came. Into it went a scaled-up version of the following (adapted from the Cranks' Recipe Book):

A spud, an onion, a carrot, a cooking apple, 2 cloves of garlic, all diced as in the picture, then gently fried until the onion is transparent. A large spoon of curry powder, 2 pints of veggie stock (Vecon is good) and a tin of the ever-useful Italian tomatoes then go in on top. Then bring it all to the boil while stirring, turn it down and let it simmer for half an hour. I did all this (ably assisted by Lunchista fille) the previous day and left it overnight. In the morning I got out one of those hand-held blenders and whizzed it smooth.

Why Mulligatawny? The rationale was fairly straightforward: if it's vegetarian then anybody can drink it, and if it packs a bit of heat then each mugful will warm us up more. It also turned out, by a happy coincidence, to be our chief Orchardista's favourite soup.

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 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...

Orchard of Promises

Have you ever noticed that you can walk, or drive, past places every day and not have the slightest idea that they even exist? Until, perhaps, somebody asks you about them, or having left the vicinity you happen to return, years later, as a tourist.

Word reached Lunchista that some simple, hard slog was needed to help restore a neglected orchard just a couple of miles down the road. The orchard lies just beyond an out-of-town shopping centre which, appropriately enough, was built on the site of a mental hospital's grounds. It transpired that two-thirds of the orchard had in fact been destroyed in order to build the shopping centre: sadly the mental hospital was no longer around to provide suitable accommodation for whoever came up with that idea.

So, for about a decade, the remaining trees have been offering their fruit each year, unnoticed except for a few locals who were still in the know, the ground staff of the shopping centre who used it as an organic dustbin, and Tescos, who (rumour had it) wanted to pull up the remaining trees to make way for a garden centre.

We turned up one day in late winter. It felt odd walking past all the designer clothes, dressed as if for a spot of fellwalking but with the interesting addition of a bowsaw, a spade and a pair of loppers. It would have made an unlikely (but rather entertaining) story "down the station" if there'd suddenly been a terrorist alert at the shopping centre.

We shovelled half-decayed garden waste away from the tree-trunks, to stop them from rotting. We heaved it all onto a trailer that the groundsmen had helpfully left there. It turned out that everybody was happy to let us get on with it: less work for the groundsmen and something nice to put in the CSR reports of both the shopping centre and their landlords. The groundsmen had never heard of on-site composting, but you can't have everything.

Some of the trees had dead branches, which we lopped off, and during the harder-than-usual winter, rabbits had been gnawing the bark. Lunchista's offer of an air-rifle wasn't taken up though, for some reason.

We have been back twice, and the groundsmen have helpfully lit a bonfire for the wood waste (except the good bits, which have quietly been spirited away to the woodburning stove at Chateau Lunchista). It looks as if all the trees bar one have pulled through, and those which are missing from the rows can be replaced, with local breeds of apple, pear and plum.

If all your apples turn up at once (or you have just cadged some from the ground somewhere and they don't look very presentable) it's easy to deal with. Just peel them, cut into chunks, simmer for a few minutes til soft, mash with a spudbasher, and freeze. Apple puree can be served hot or cold with any permutation of: sugar, raisins, fruit syrup, ice-cream, chocolate, breakfast cereal, rabbit (all right I made that last one up).

The orchard is now Registered, so no-one can demolish it without incurring the wrath of PTES. The Plan is to turn it into a Community Orchard and have picnic tables and events. In the long run, the plan is to still have apples, no matter how expensive, or unreliable, the supply of imported fruit (or indeed rabbits) may become.

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24th April: It looks as if The National Trust have been following the Year-Long Lunch Break! Funds have been set up for preserving and reviving old orchards. Perhaps we're starting a new fashion.