» Fruit

In the winter of 2009-2010, a mixed fruit orchard was planted with a wide variety of types of soft fruit and top fruit, including popular fruits such as raspberries, blackcurrants, apples, pears and plums, and more unusual fruits such as medlars and quinces. This will ultimately provide the produce for a fruit CSA which works along similar lines to the veg CSA.

The orchard is now looking good thanks to everyone’s hard work getting it planted, weeded and mulched! Currently the trees are growing well and we are beginning to harvest some soft fruit. We were able to include a small amount of rhubarb in the vegetable shares of spring 2011, and are currently selling small quantities of fruit when available to veg share members. So far in 2011 this has included raspberries and currants from the fruit orchard. This has been supplemented by locally harvested fruits from members’ gardens.

As our own trees will not begin to bear a lot of fruit for a few years yet, we have started a community fruit share scheme to add top fruit to the fruit which is harvested from the Canalside orchard. If you have excess fruit, and would like it to go somewhere it can be used, please get in touch with Ali. We will help to harvest the fruit, leave a portion with you and then use the rest to help make up fruit shares which we will offer to paying fruit share members. In return we will undertake to give you advice in caring for the shrubs or trees that we use and will give help and training in pruning and other tasks. Any fruit will do – apples, pears, plums, cherries etc – and we are also interested if you have a source of soft fruit (blackberries, currants etc) as well.

If you know of anyone who has a number of trees and doesn’t know what to do with all the fruit let Ali know as well and we will contact them to discuss the possibility of donating it. It would be good to have a wide a range of fruit varieties as possible as they all have different qualities and keeping abilities.

All money raised this way is put back into the orchard to supplement the lottery local food grant that we have obtained to establish the Fruit CSA.

Partially funded by: