The Grounded Orchardist

A summary of my orcharding adventure in 2022

So 2022 really was a confusing year for fruit growing. Very much full of ups and downs, actually I’ll change that to downs and ups. It doesn’t have the same ring to it but its much more accurate!

Winter pruning

The year started with the usual excitement of winter pruning. Pruning marks the start of the next growing season in my mind. You start to think ahead for each and every tree. The trees I was working on needed a fair bit of help and I told my boss it would take 2 years to get them in shape. Last year I was still in my first year and limited with how much I could take off. There was a lot of bringing the height down and a lot of untangling where the trees were growing into each other. I was as brutal as I dared and I’m pleased to say it paid off. This year as I begin to winter prune I can really see the difference. A few varieties need another year, maybe two but most have responded very well!

Blossom time in the orchard

It was a very good blossom year, something which was very exciting! Blossom equals another step to seeing future fruiting potential! However, the weather went very cold, we got a late frost which killed off the stone fruit, alot of the pear blossom and some apple trees in a corner of the orchard where the frost got a bit stuck. The other noticeable thing was the lack of pollinators due to the cold. As standard I hand pollinate Apricots and Peaches. However, I can’t hand pollinate 2500 top fruit trees. So the reliance was on the wind, rain and a few pollinators that were braving the cold.

Fruitlet stage

Then a bit later on we’re at fruitlet stage. The next step to knowing our crop potential! We haven’t had June drop yet and I haven’t thinned. Due to the frost we know its not a great crop but we definitely have something (except the plums, gages and Mirabelles…these sadly didn’t crop at all this year). So we have an idea what we’re potentially expecting and thats exciting! However, on one sad day…I was sat in a meeting in a room very close to the orchard and it was raining. It got heavier and heavier and the sky got darker and darker and then it turned to Hail. A big storm which put a layer of white everywhere. I just put my head in my hands. I knew there was no chance we got away with that one. Everyone in the meeting thought I was being a bit dramatic but I know my job… that was not good! Hail is so devastating! It took me three days to get the guts to assess the damage. As I feared, it had attacked all the fruit on site. Apricots were pitted, apples with bruise marks and bits of frost damage, leaves were shredded…this was bad. However, as usual we’ll make the best of it!

June drop and fruit thinning

June drop and thinning gave us our definitive answer about how much fruit we’d have. It wasn’t great, especially working with Hail damaged fruit and leaves. The good news was because the hail hit early, the new leaves grew very quickly.

Summer in the orchard

Then came the heatwave and drought conditions, it was 40°C in the orchard. The trickle irrigation was no match for those temperatures. We were using it at night of course but the water just sat on the surface and evaporated. Due to the lack of water over this time even when temperatures were cooler it meant a lot of our fruit was small. Our Pear crop suffered from being around a sixth of the size they should have been. Also fruit was falling off the tree early due to the drought meaning I had a job on my hands to save this fruit and quickly harvest what was ready before it dropped.

Pests and disease in the orchard

In terms of pests and disease I think we did very well. We grow organically and haven’t even organically treated anything. There was a bit of powdery mildew which I manually cut out but it was very manageable. Due to the lack of water and intense heat, the apple and pear scab was less than I’ve ever seen! There was a little woolly aphid but again it was manageable. Of course the caterpillars were back with a vengeance but again I manually pulled them out of the tree in their webby nests. Our biggest pest and disease problems this year was pigeons eating the apricot fruit buds and brown rot in the apples.

Orchard beneficial insects

I’m pleased to say we have honey bees, currently we have five hives but plan to get more in the coming year. These will help the orchard greatly. I’m also pleased to say we have lots of earwigs, ladybirds and birds in the orchard. I would like many more. Like I said earlier, due to the cold the pollinating/beneficial insects briefly went and hid again in spring. They also disappeared in summer during the heatwave. I did think even if the irrigation wasn’t helping the trees enormously then at least the wildlife can grab a drink!

I have an Integrated pest and pollination management plan which I hope to start implementing this year, I’m very excited about this!!

The orchard harvest

Harvest time was early and very fast in 2022. Apples were ripening very quickly. The earliest such as Discovery were fine but later varieties were just ripening at an incredibly fast pace. We started the harvest two weeks earlier than last year and finished four weeks earlier than last year!

So, how did the fruit fare?

As I said the pears were tiny, it was already a depleted crop due to the frost damage. However the Pears all went off to be made into Eau de Vie which is very exciting and we should get the finished product back in July 2023.

The apples mostly went to be pressed into our own apple juice for the guests. The Kitchens also used a lot of the Bramley and Granny Smiths. Red Bramleys were a favourite of the kitchen as you didn’t need to add as much sugar. (A surprise for me, an ex commercial fruit grower needing to adhere to the rules of the supermarkets “Bramleys must be green!”) A couple of guests even picked a red Bramley and ate it like a normal eating apple. We’re missing a trick commercially I think!

The Kitchens used the Apricots and our figs were fantastic, fig leaves were also used for a fig leaf ice cream!

We had a great Quince crop the kitchens use a lot of these. These trees needed a lot of work too so that was a relief.

The Cherries cropped a little as I did a major prune on them but not enough for the Kitchens to use so we left them for the birds and wildlife.

Summary

So, to sum up. The fruit enjoyed the sun, the taste of every apple was sweet even when green and underripe. We needed more rain! We needed the frost to have been earlier and the hail to have fallen somewhere else but its turned out to be ok. A very challenging growing year but we’ve made the best of it with minimal wastage and resulting in a couple of top class products to boot! The other important thing is that I have learnt a lot this year. At this stage I’m pleased with the year and I look forward to a better year in 2023. The fruit bud on most trees is looking fantastic meaning we’re back at step one….fruit buds equals future fruit potential….

Happy new year everyone!