A Good Year For Apples
A Good Year For Apples
Generally it has been a good year for our apples and many of the trees in our orchards have been heavily laden with fruit. Also doing well are the insects, particularly wasps and butterflies, that appreciate apples that have started to over-ripen. Our camera traps are also showing foxes and badgers taking advantage of the windfalls and with the first frosts blackbirds and thrushes will be tucking in. One revelation this year has been the size of some of our traditional apples, the photo showing different varieties but with a conventional apple in the middle. These are dual purpose apples, good for both eating and cooking and those in the photo all weighing in at around three-quarters of a pound (0.34 kilograms) each.
Also doing well are crab-apples which often turn up in our hedgerows and are covering a 
pavement near one of the village road exits. This is our traditional apple and was once a very common tree in our hedgerows but the apple that we eat originates in the Tien Shan mountains in Asia and eventually worked its way down the silk roads to reach Britain, no-one is too sure when but was well-established in the mediaeval monasteries. The heritage varieties we have planted often date back several hundreds of years so the apple you could be sampling might also have been tasted by Shakespeare although he made few references to them other than examples like ‘There is small choice in rotten apples