70 days ago
My hero, Charles Ingalls, would have been proud of me as I defied almost non stop rain to start harvesting. I also brought in stacks of wood for the stove in the living room as it really is getting cold and the gas heating seems to be on the blink, yet again.
117 days ago
The old orchard at the Welsh Hovel sits between our back garden and the river and contains four very old apple trees. There were five but the floods did for one of them a year or so ago. The new orchard containing about thirty trees of which just over a third are apples or crab apples is four years old and the newest clutch of apple trees at the top of the vegetable patch can be seen HERE. But there is a fourth group of trees planted last year by myself and my pal C.
1138 days ago
Unlike Eleanor I do not want 50p from you to help plant a tree. Nor do I want to cover the whole of Wales and much of England with trees in the misguided belief that this will save the planet. Instead I just buy my own trees with my own money to make this place where I live a better place. Here are the latest two which will soon be joining the 22 tree new orchard I have created on the upper field above the barns.
1145 days ago
After last night’s triumph with the apple juice from the River orchard, today I picked the rest of the edible apples from the new top orchard. This is only the second year for the trees and they all yielded well and I am sure will do better still next year. However, I reckon that I have room for at least four more trees in the upper orchard and so am minded to buy another three apple trees and one more crabapple tree to assist with polination and to increase the amount of crabapple jelly I produce.
1405 days ago
Just a couple of snaps from the top inner field where I created the strawberry patch but also planted a second orchard – the first being apple only and down by the river. The trees are a mixture of apples, crab apples, pears, plums and two small fig trees. I have ordered another tree – a rare species but one native to Britain. More on that later when it arrives in the next week or two.
1516 days ago
I harvest not just for myself but for the pensioner couple one house up the lane and 95 year old E one house further up. And so we have a small number of crab apples from the two trees I planted this year – enough for one small pot of crab apple jelly, the last of the damsons for gin and then stacks of cooking apples from the orchard by the river and pears from a tree in the centre of the vegetable patch. Then finally some rhubarb which I planted this year… I have promised the family rhubarb crumble this evening. But I will also be making apple jam, pear jam and maybe a bit of rhubarb and ginger gin.
