The next HFS Volunteer Workshops at the Petty's Orchard Heritage Fruit block will take place:
- the first Wednesday in March, 2 March
- the month's first Sunday, 6 March
- the month's third Wednesday, 16 March
You're cordially invited to join in with:
- Picking fruit for our forthcoming public Apple Tasting events (see below)
- Doing maintenance checks on trees in the nursery area, its irrigation cube, and the plum and apricot collections
- Mowing, weeding, whipper-snipping, rabbit-hole-filling and other regular clean-ups
- Checking and refreshing mulch around young trees
- Apple tree label painting
As always, a highlight will be our ever-popular socially-distanced chats over nibbles and cuppas. Please
bring your own keep-cup to avoid making unnecessary rubbish.
We hope to seeing you soon!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
This season's Apple Tastings: Yes, we're delighted finally to be able to run these popular public events again! But we're expecting to run only three or four of these this autumn, given the extremely thin crop across practically all our apple varieties. So if you've missed out on the last few years' HFS Apple Tastings, register soon - places are limited. The first of these will be on the afternoon of
Sunday 13 March - event details and registration are
here. We'll announce the dates for the next ones soon: one will probably be run near the end of March and another in mid-April.
WHAT'S GOING ON AT THE HFS BLOCK AT PETTY'S
The principal goal of these emails is to announce forthcoming HFS events. But we're aware that many would also like a taste of what is happening at the HFS orchard block at Petty's, and within HFS in general. So from time to time we'll provide updates here about what's been going on and what's being planned. If you want to know even more, the best way is to come along to a workshop and see for yourself!
The HFS orchard block's tree collection: Over the last few years, the HFS block at Petty's has expanded remarkably in scope. A visitor to the block ten years ago would have seen about 200 apple varieties, with many of the trees in poor or dying condition. Today, not only do we grow well over 300 apple varieties, but removing some older and redundant rows has allowed us to expand the collection greatly. We've even finally and resolutely put the 's' into "Heritage Fruits": many hard years of collecting and nurturing have culminated in the establishment of our plum collection of historic plums, which now includes about 100 varieties. Smaller but slowly expanding variety ranges of apricot, pear and medlar trees are now also growing on the block. These acquisitions are all carefully targeted to conserve rare and/or significant heritage varieties of these fruits.
Facility improvement plans: Despite all this growth in our scope on the ground, one area that hasn't grown is our facilities space. Our sole storage area is our iconic 50-plus year old 20-foot shipping container, in which we store all our equipment as well as most of the other items and materials we use for our operations and public-facing events. While the container's rustic (in part, without the '-ic') colour and appearance is oddly complementary to its setting, its dubious waterproofing certainly is an on-going concern - especially as our storage requirements have grown significantly in recent years.
But thanks to a very generous donation from a private sponsor, plus the allocation of additional funds from HFS, we will construct a new shed to expand our storage area, and will also improve the facilities for our workshops and public events. Planning is still very much in the initial stages, as we are proceeding with this project very deliberately: we intend that whatever new works we do will be done right the first (and only) time, and will suit our needs for many years to come. We'll obviously have much more to say about this as the project gets going.
What's happening in the HFS Nursery: It's in the nature of an orchard that trees do their thing slowly and methodically, and so do we. Volunteers who visit rarely could be excused for thinking nothing ever changes! But constant if subtle improvements are continuously being made at these workshops through our group's efforts, thanks entirely to the broad range of skills and experience of our fantastic volunteers and their communal dedication. A particular focus in the last few years has been the HFS Nursery (there's a photo of this in the previous Workshop email), which has gradually been converted from a sun-scorched, weed-infested and poorly-irrigated jungle into a maintainable and valuable facility. It now has proper shade-cloth protection, is much better mulched and protected from weeds, has individual baths for maintaining young trees, and boasts an ever-improving low-maintenance irrigation system. The point of all this hard work is that we can now much more reliably nurse young trees from point of grafting until they are planted out or sold - all of which is absolutely central to our goal of conserving a wide range of fruit tree varieties and being able to offer them and their fruits to the public.
Our visibility at Petty's: At our Sunday workshops during the harvest season last year, we set up a marquee where we sold our apples directly to Petty's Orchard's many day visitors. We'll do this again this year, as it proved to be an excellent opportunity to let people know directly about HFS and what we do - about which, not surprisingly, most visitors have no awareness whatsoever. We are also updating the poster by the block's gate which gives general information about us and our activities, and plan to run an orchard tour for visitors at each Sunday workshop (at least during the warmer months).
COVID-19 NOTICE
Most long-standing COVID-19 restrictions have now been lifted, but nonetheless:
- If you are feeling unwell - even with only mild symptoms - please protect yourself and others by doing the right thing and staying at home and getting tested
- All volunteers should endeavour to maintain social distancing at all times
- Please feel free to wear a mask if and when you wish
