AUTUMN

September

In the garden

During my years as a gardener, I’ve been involved in various community gardening projects, including one at a local primary school, worked by me and another mother, the children in the after-school gardening club and the school gardener, who taught the children about all things ecological. As well as raised beds, in which we grew a variety of edibles and flowers, we had a small orchard with six heritage apple trees, two plum trees, and a strip of native hedgerow plants, including medlars, hazel and rowan trees, and two blackcurrant bushes. Four chickens, hatched out at school, scratched in a run beside the trees. Plenty came in the form of an enormous, 25m-tall cooking apple tree. The problem was always how to get the apples down.

In A New Orchard and Garden, the Yorkshire vicar William Lawson (1553-1635) describes various useful apparatus for picking: ‘A gathering apron like a poak before you, made of a purpose, or a wallet hung on a bough, or a basket with a sieve bottom, or skin bottome, with lathes or splinters under, hung in a rope to pull up and down.’ I found some great modern versions in the USA (at durokon.com) – padded nylon bucket bags that strap to your back, and a net bag with a scalloped plastic edge that you attach to a telescopic handle.

Lawson’s advice on picking for storing is: ‘Gather your fruit when it is ripe, and not before, else will it wither, and be tough and sower. All fruits generally are ripe when they begin to fall.’ Aside from looking out for unblemished fruit dropping, you can cup the apple and twist gently to see if it will disengage. Try to get them all down by the end of October