Planted in spring 2014, the orchard has had its ups and downs, notably, its slow start in life.  In hindsight, we should have dug the ground more thoroughly before planting, as we found that the trees couldn’t get their roots deep into the ground and instead hit hard ground below the top soil, made up of dense sand and ironstone and the roots could only grow sideways.  The result was stunted growth, which almost 10 years on still shows.  That said, the annual crop is generally increasing year on year as the trees grow and mature and we found that the addition of an irrigation system has really helped on our sandy soil as we couldn’t keep up with watering requirements in hot weather.  We did start the trees off with a michorizal root dip to aid growth and added blood fish and bone, but I think getting the roots into the ground would have been the best start to the trees’ life.

Some trees have done much better than others and you can see the vigour of the ‘Bramley 20’ has been useful in our situation, and one of the best growing trees is the most recently planted plum tree, ‘Guinevere’, planted after a metre cubed of soil had been dug out and mixed with rotted horse manure.  This was done with all the trees in the main orchard area, but planting initially into the worked soil really showed how the others had been effected by the initial limited root growth.

This year, 2023, has seen the best crop come out of the orchard as enjoyed by many individuals and groups visiting The Garden House, and you may have had chance to sample some our apples from the stall which we have had at the end of our drive.  ‘Red Pixie’ has been a particularly pleasing crop this year, as it hadn’t fruited properly up until this year and it is a fine Surrey eating apple – sweet, flavoursome and a pleasing crisp texture – we finally discovered!

Our regular groups and volunteers who attend The Garden House have been picking, eating and taking apples back with them for eating and making apple pies, crumbles etc., as well as helping with picking for delivering apples to The Godalming and Community Store (food bank), who also feed into St. Mark’s food bank in Godalming.  We sent apples to a Macmillan morning at Witley Infant School.  We picked apples for Open Grounds, a community cafe in Guildford, who were focusing on saving food waste, so they were happy accept fruit with marks or distorted and their hard work resulted in the creation of apple jam, apple juice, apple cake, apple crumble, apple strudel and apple salad – well done!  It was sad to hear that this summer The Garden Cider Company has been unable to carry on, with whom we have previously taken cider apples to, and instead we found Barnard’s Cider at Arbinger Hammer, as an outlet for our cider apple crop (they accept all sorts of apples in return for a share of the finished cider).  

As an addition to the orchard, we have also discovered that what we thought were crab apple trees in the woodland are random edible apples, so we have also been making use of those – apples being used for juicing at Rosamund Community Garden’s Apple Juicing Day and for food banks.

Pop-In volunteers enjoying the orchard harvest (standing by a ‘Red Pixie’ tree) 

Volunteers from Halow picking apples for their group and Open Grounds, community café

Andy (Author) with the apple cart