\n\tThe sweet apple originally came from the Tien Shan Mountains in Kazakhstan thousands of miles away and it took many centuries to work its way along the silk routes to the Middle East and Europe. If you plant the pips from, say, a Cox’s Orange Pippin you will get a variety of different apple types, many of them of little use so to get another true Cox’s you have to graft them, a skill that was well known to the Romans. You may hear people referring to hybrids between a crab and a sweet apple but this does not happen and DNA analysis of the origins of the sweet apple has found that crabs were not involved in its evolution.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n \n\tBecause of this great variability you never quite know what might pop up and many new varieties were chance discoveries. Claygate Pearmain (which grows in our Community Orchard) was found in a hedgerow in Surrey but once discovered grafting ensured that that tasty variety is still available to us these days. In the heyday of apple development in Britain there were thousands of varieties. Farmers would spread the mush from cider production around the edges of their fields to see what new varieties might appear and if you look out of the window of the car or train you will see apple trees growing from the cores lobbed out of the windows by passengers – there are several on the link road past Pencoedtre. These are known as ‘wilding’ apples.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n \n\tCommercia<\/span> \n\tSo enjoy your apples whether you plant a tree or two in your garden or visit one of our traditional orchards in the parish. There is increasing evidence that the older varieties may be better for you and being locally sourced you avoid the air miles involved in shipping your fruit from other continents to your supermarket. And wildlife will benefit.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n \n\t <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you visit the orchards in May you should still see plenty of blossom around, the majority of the trees being apples. But what is an apple and where does it come from? The first distinction is between the crab-apple and the sweet apple that we eat. The crab is our native apple and you can often find it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6cWjO-apples","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8363,"url":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?p=8363","url_meta":{"origin":3206,"position":0},"title":"Community Orchards Resurgence","author":"Alan Williams","date":"5th October 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"NATURE NOTES Community Orchards Resurgence With 5 Community Orchards in the parish we are starting to reclaim some of the ground lost through the wholesale removal of orchards over the last hundred years. In this and future articles we shall consider the origin of orchards, the history of their rise\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nature Notes"","block_context":{"text":"Nature Notes","link":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?cat=49"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Picture5.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Picture5.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Picture5.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Picture5.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":6590,"url":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?p=6590","url_meta":{"origin":3206,"position":1},"title":"A Good Year For Apples","author":"Alan Williams","date":"30th September 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nature Notes"","block_context":{"text":"Nature Notes","link":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?cat=49"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Pic-07.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3601,"url":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?p=3601","url_meta":{"origin":3206,"position":2},"title":"Sputnik Pea Gall","author":"Alan Williams","date":"25th August 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0 \u00a0 This fellow traveler took off sixty years ago and it was the first of its kind. The second one carried a dog and the photo shows one of several found down at Goldsland Farm. Confused? Well, the first artificial earth satellite was, of course, Sputnik, which is Russian\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nature Notes"","block_context":{"text":"Nature Notes","link":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?cat=49"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8497,"url":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?p=8497","url_meta":{"origin":3206,"position":3},"title":"More Apple History","author":"Alan Williams","date":"30th October 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"NATURE NOTES More Apple History We left last month with apple-growing in Britain at its peak and several thousand varieties available, many of them developed and bred in Britain. Wenvoe had at least 15 orchards in 1900, clearly shown on the Ordnance Survey map. Whilst the odd relict tree may\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Picture9-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8726,"url":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?p=8726","url_meta":{"origin":3206,"position":4},"title":"The Welsh Have No Use For Orchards!","author":"Alan Williams","date":"29th November 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"The Welsh Have No Use For Orchards nor Gardens! (The Welsh) have no use for orchards nor gardens'. So said Gerald of Wales, the 12th\/13th century historian and archdeacon of Brecon. We described in the previous two issues something of the background and history of the sweet apple - so\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nature Notes"","block_context":{"text":"Nature Notes","link":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?cat=49"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Picture7.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2724,"url":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?p=2724","url_meta":{"origin":3206,"position":5},"title":"Apple and Lemon Samosas","author":"Alan Williams","date":"1st March 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0 Apple and Lemon Samosas 2 cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped Zest of one lemon 50g caster sugar 1 tsp ground mixed spice 50g sultanas 4 sheets of filo pastry 25g melted butter \u00a0 Heat oven 180C. Place the apples, lemon zest, sug-ar, mixed spice and sultanas in a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mr Greedy's Kitchen"","block_context":{"text":"Mr Greedy's Kitchen","link":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?cat=129"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3206"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3207,"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3206\/revisions\/3207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wenvoe.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/MAY-NN-Wild-Pear-Wenvoe-flowers-19-04-12.jpg?resize=300%2C222\")
l orchards have little value for wildlife as the trees are kept short, grubbed up after around 7 to 8 years and sprayed regularly through the season. In a traditional orchard the trees are allowed to grow to their full size and may live for 100 years or more. These are a haven for wildlife attracting many of the species that would have been common before our orchards were destroyed, including rare beetles such as the Golden Chafer and birds like the Wryneck. In 1900 there were about 15 orchards in Wenvoe but little evidence of these remain other than <\/span>in the names of some houses and streets.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n