Julia and I are mid 40s with 2 teenage daughters. I have been a GP in the NHS for 16 years and have recently diversified into dermatology and medical education. We're originally from London. I've always loved apples, she's always wanted to be a farmer. I remember asking my father why anyone planted any tree other than an apple, and planting cores in the garden hoping they would grow into fruiting trees. I scrumped when I could. Then came growing up, grammar and then medical school, the tyranny of adult responsibility, work etc. During all this time I no doubt ate apples, but don't remember much about it.

The dream

One day, I saw an article in the Sunday Times magazine which was all about ye olde traditional English apple, and an accompanying advert and offer from Highfield nursery offering a collection of 6 cordon apples. I remember the varieties, Michaelmas Red, D'Arcy Spice, Orleans Reinette, Early Victoria, Ellison's Orange and Ribston Pippin. I had no idea there were so many apples with so much history, character, personality and that looked so good, to judge from the watercolours. I was hooked from that moment. I dreamed of an orchard.

We toyed with the idea of buying an acre of land in the early eighties when we could have got a paddock for £3000 or so, but there was too much else on career wise so we put it off until later. How could we have foreseen the insane property price explosion that was about to happen? By the time we had finally got it together to try to buy some land, the eighties property boom was raging, and silly Yuppie and property developer money from the City was buying every little paddock in the hope of speculative gain,  and we couldn't get land for less than £10,000 an acre. We raged against the system as rich speculators bought up parcels of land to build houses for executive homes that we wanted to plant apple trees on, but in the end forgot about our dream.

The purchase

Then one day in 1992, after the property value collapse, I saw an advert for 9 acres of pasture in Durley, Southern Hampshire, for a price that made me blink, rub my eyes and look again. It was a little less than £4,000 an acre. To spare you the boring detail, 2 months later in September 1992 we knelt in prayer and thanksgiving on OUR land and asked God to grant us success in planting up an orchard.

There was no question at this stage about living on the land. Those of you reading this from abroad may not appreciate the severity and restrictiveness of the English planing laws. If we built a house or shack on our own land without permission, the authorities would force us to demolish it at our own expense. Permission to build is very hard to get for an individual and is seldom granted, although when the orchard is hopefully in full bearing, if we can show the planing authority that we are making a significant amount of money from agricultural produce of the land, AND can also demonstrate a need to live on the land, we MAY be able to get permission for a tied agricultural dwelling. This may be hard for US, Australian or New Zealand citizens to believe, but we have so much less liberty than you in many matters like this. I think it goes back to the Norman conquest. Also, to be fair, we are a pretty overcrowded small island. A previous owner of the land was refused permission to build a house on it.

The planting

The first job was to get the first area for planting ploughed up by a contractor and then fenced around to keep the abundant local rabbits and deer out. To check the necessity of this, we tried planting a few apple trees with just rabbit guards in the open field. The deer ate them for breakfast. We sank fine wire mesh 10 cm under the ground and took coarser wire netting up to 2 metres.

Using information from books, we chose the varieties for our first planting. We planted 200 apples and 40 plums which we mostly got from Blackmoor nurseries, Liss near Petersfield, Hampshire. they are still in my book the best nurserymen, although they don't list as many varieties as they used to. You should get along to one of their Apple Day shows if you can (unless of course you're coming to OURS!). We planted Bramleys, Ellison's Orange, James Grieve, Laxton's Epicure, Ashmead's Kernel, Spartan, Egremont Russet, Sunset, Lord Lambourne, Suntan, Red Pippin, Orleans Reinette, Winter King, Sturmer Pippin and one or two others. For plums, we planted some Cambridge Gage, Victoria, Merryweather Damson and an unnamed yellow plum we had found in the garden of our very first house and liked very much. This was a mistake, as for some reason it has ever fruited and I am going to pull them all out his year. Would have been better off planting more Victorias or Damsons. The Greengages have been very slow to crop, but lovely, and this year they look as though they might start paying their keep.

We made quite a few other mistakes, but as Cardinal Newman said, the man who never made a mistake never made anything. With God's help, we made an orchard, although it is still very much work in progress.

In defence of spraying

We were really keen to be organic, to the extent that we tried to control weeds by hoeing and did no spraying at all. We spent many an hour working up the rows squashing thousands of caterpillars that were eating our trees by hand. It took us about 3 years to realise the fact that this approach was totally unrealistic and it wasn't working. We had severe infestations of winter moth caterpillars, apple scab, mildew, apple sawfly and what not. Many trees died, others were stunted. When in the third year we had our first crop, 19 out of 20 Apples had one or more Codling moth maggots in it. There was clearly no future in this so we decided to start spraying. The trees shot ahead, relieved of their heavy load of pests and diseases.

Of course we would strongly prefer not to spray, but even "organic" growers spray with total killer poisons like nicotine which is OK by them as it comes from a plant. The customer will not accept a scabby, maggoty apple, let alone pay a premium price necessary for it since the crop yield is reduced by the pest load. Sorry about that. Of course we use an absolute minimum of pesticide, not least because it costs money and it's very uncomfortable to trudge up and down the orchard rows on a dry summer's day in protective clothing with a 15 litter knapsack sprayer on your back. Believe me, I would rather be writing poetry or making daisy chains. But don't be put off by this frankness, anything you eat from the shops is sprayed, and safety rules are stringent and enforced. We are the canaries, as not only do we eat massive amounts of our own fruit, to say nothing of the cider, but we are spraying them for hours, if anyone was going to have a problem it would be us. The last spray goes on by midsummer, so the dew, the wind and the rain has been on the fruit for 2 months after the last application before it gets to you.

Remember, and I speak as a medical man, that all the research (and there is a lot of it) that shows the health benefits of eating fruit as opposed to not eating it, was done with sprayed fruit-there is no other kind in the shops. I'm not saying I like it, it's just true.

The Second Orchard

By the autumn of 1996 it was time to move on to the next stage and plant the second orchard. It had always been our plan to eventually plant up about 5 of our 9 acres with apple trees (see the copse for the story of what we did with some of the rest of the land). We learned from our mistakes and made a more careful planting. This time, the cost was far less as I had been growing on 500 trees I had grafted, this saved us about £3,000 which was great as we didn't any profits from the orchard yet (still don't!)

I will write some more here later.
Last updated 15th June 2001