Writing in early December and we’re already welcoming some of our favourite winter visitors, flocks of Fieldfare thrushes are arriving from Northern Europe to feast on fallen apples in the orchard. We’ll be enjoying their chatter and aerial displays for most of winter.
The trees themselves are entering dormancy now preparing for their winter hibernation with the fall of leaves. We grow a variety of British apples and plums here on our 8 acre Fenland orchard including the iconic Bramley. It’s Bramley apple trees you see framing the view from our tea room. They’re mature trees, some nearing 100 years of age.
Odd to think that Britain’s most famous cooking apple, Bramley’s Seedling, should by rights be known as Brailsford’s Seedling as the first Bramley tree was grown from seed, sometime between 1809 and 1813, by Mary Brailsford of Southwell, Nottinghamshire.
It was after Mary’s death that the then owner of her cottage, Matthew Bramley, allowed nursery man Henry Merryweather to take grafts from the tree. Merryweather subsequently went on to win a Royal Horticultural Society First Class Certificate for Bramley’s Seedling in 1883 and the rest as they say is history with Bramley apples being grown commercially from the 1890’s onwards. Many a fruit growers fortune was made from the Bramley, travel around Fenland villages and you’ll come across quite a few large old houses bearing the name “Bramley House”, named for the apple that enabled the grower to build the house.
Sadly times have changed and lack of commercial viability and the ever pressing need for building land has seen the loss of over two thirds of English orchards since the 1950’s. Diversification is the name of the game for many growers hoping to save their orchards for future generations.
Diversification first came in the form of a farm shop, a natural progression from the farm gate sales of apples, pears and plums. At first that’s all that was sold in the shop and it closed for several months of the year when the apples were all gone. Now days the farm shop is open 7 days a week and as well as selling our own fruit, grown on site in the orchard, stocks a variety of locally grown seasonal fruit and veg, freerange eggs, local honey, apple juice and homemade jams and chutneys.
Further diversification came in 2012 with the opening of The Orchard Tea Room. Our location just a few hundred yards off the busy A47 at Wisbech makes it an ideal stopping place for drivers who wish to break their journey to and from Norfolk. It’s also a lovely amenity for local people, one of the few orchards that is open to the public on a daily basis, dogs are welcome and we host several charity dog shows throughout the summer months. We’re also delighted to be able to offer local artists exhibition space in our tea room.
But no matter how much one diversifies from fruit growing the orchard trees still need tending and the winter months are some of the busiest of the year when the apple trees are pruned. So while our customers are enjoying tea and cake or a warming bowl of homemade soup by the log burner on a cold winter’s day some of us will be outside in the wind and rain pruning!
Another winter project, this time for the dark evenings at home, is to catalogue the vast number of apple recipes we’ve collected over the years, many of them given to us by customers. We sometimes share a recipe on The Orchard Tea Room blog http://theorchardtearoom.blogspot.com here’s one, given to us by a jam and pickle making local lady, that may be of interest to jam makers. It’s a recipe for fine shred orange marmalade made using apple jelly:
BRAMLEY APPLE JELLY MARMALADE
Ingredients:
2 kg of Bramley apples
4 large sweet oranges
Juice of a large lemon
Granulated sugar
Method:
Wash and peel the oranges, reserve the orange flesh.
Cut away the pith and shred the orange peel finely.
Put the shredded peel in a saucepan, cover with water bring to the boil then simmer for approximately an hour and half until the peel is soft.
Strain and reserve the peel.
Wash and slice the apples and put them in a preserving pan along with the reserved orange flesh, lemon juice and enough water to cover.
Bring to the boil then simmer until the fruit is very soft.
Mash the fruit, then strain through a jelly bag, reserve the juice.
Measure the juice as you pour it back into the preserving pan.
Add 450 grams of granulated sugar to each pint of liquid.
Bring slowly to the boil stirring to dissolve the sugar then boil for 15 minutes whilst skimming to keep the jelly clear.
After 15 minutes add the cooked, shredded peel and continue to boil for a further 5 minutes or until set.
Remove from the heat, stir to distribute the peel and jar as normal.
theorchardtearoom.co.uk
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