Apple Day

Join us in our heritage orchard to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of our heritage orchard being planted! A wonderful day to enjoy all things apple including apple refreshments and a delicious lunch.
 
This is your chance to learn about some of our 100 varieties, from Oxford Beauty and Blenheim Orange to Eynsham Dumpling and Dog's Snout.
 
There will be talks about apples, apple identification, samples of apples to taste and compare, and a chance to explore the orchard and pick some fruit. There will be a demonstration of cider making and an opportunity to taste some of FarmED's cider made on Apple Day last year.
 
We will be joined by Christine Elliott, a locally well-known apple enthusiast, passionate about heritage apple varieties. As part of the Kitchen Garden People, at FarmED, Christine selected the 200 fruit trees (including 60 varieties of apple) planted since the winter of 2021/22 in the agroforestry strips between the vegetable growing spaces. She will talk about the evolving range of apple varieties, characteristics of an apple to enable identification, pruning, grafting, when to pick and how to store apples for use through the winter. We'll also start making cider from windfalls at the end of the morning.
 
If you have an unidentified apple tree in your garden, we can try to identify it together, so please bring the following:
* 3 apples that are representative of the rest of the apples on the tree, and not from the end of a cluster/branch
* A twig with a few leaves from the tree
* Rough date when ripe apples started falling off the tree (if they ripened before October please keep them in the fridge before coming)
* Idea of when the tree would have been planted, often the age of the house

This event is suitable for non-expert apple enthusiasts, those interested in planting apple trees, and those who enjoy spending time outside learning about nature.