Apple harvesting and pressing
Harvest time for the monthly Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust orchard work party. The apples are ready for shaking off using a technique known as panking. It’s a long pole with a hook that can be placed into the centre of a branch and agitated until the fruit falls into the tarpaulin below.
Although the primary reason to restore the orchard is to improve the wildlife habitat that exists within these old trees, using the fruit is make cider is also an important way to keep awareness of these old orchards within the county.
Tim is a local orchard expert who makes apple and perry pear cider using these Gloucestershire varieties. He then sells them through his Orchard Revival website.
The other reason to pick the fruit, is that if it just drops to the ground, it will add nutrient into the grassland, which just encourages the more dominant undesirable species, which crowd out the indicators.
This is also a great time to set up the apple press. The juice from the harvested apples and immediately pressed tastes divine.
So most of the work party got on with the task of collecting the apples, but I had another task to do at the bottom of the orchard.
We have a new water vole translocation strategy which involves creating suitable habitat along the canal where they will be able to burrow. Although bramble in general is good to have as the soft edge to a habitat, it doesn’t work well in areas where water voles like to nest.
So I took the brush cutter and make a roughly two meter strip along the canal bank just before the reed bed which is growing up. The voles like to exit their burrow straight into reeds, so this should be ideal if it can grow with grass, rushes and sedges rather than the bramble.
This area will need to be fenced shortly, otherwise the grazing cattle will just chomp into the bank vegetation and the bramble will just grow back again.
