January 2001

Apple canker is a bacterial disease that eats into the bark. It usually enters through a wound or where the tree has been damaged by scab, a fungal disease that is more common in wet seasons, like the one we’ve just had. Next weekend Julia and I will be out working as a team, one will saw and cut out the bad wood, the other will follow down the rows applying sealant to the cut, to hopefully prevent further contamination.

If canker gets all the way round a tree, it will die. Some of the trees are so badly affected we will have to dig out and replant. I will also be paying attention to the 500 trees we planted as young saplings last winter. They will need formative pruning to get their shapes right for the future. We have 3 sections within the overall orchard, and have named them. The oldest, planted in 1992 we call Bunyards, after Edward Bunyard who wrote the classic appreciation of fruit “The anatomy of dessert”, ( I searched for 5 years for this hard-to-find book, then tracked down a signed first edition in a bookshop in Madstone. A few weeks later, another copy was found!) and his relative George who was a grower who also wrote a book that I treasure, “Fruit farming for profit”. Bunyards yielded nearly all of our fruit this year and has a large number of eating varieties. The next orchard, which contains most of the vintage cider trees, we call Filbarrel, after a cider variety. We like the name. The final orchard we called Cobbett’s, after William, of course. He was a farmer as well as a radical politician and his book “The English Gardener” has details for training espalier fruit trees, which he recommended.

(for non-Botley readers, William Cobbet is famous locally and nationally. He was a political radical, farmer, author and journalist who lived in Botley and is commemorated here by a stone erected by the National Union of Journalists. He was a great champion of the rights of working men and of free speech, and was imprisoned at Newgate jail in London for criticising the government over the flogging of some soldiers. His most famous book is Rural Rides, a travel diary which describes his journeys on horseback around the counties of southern England and his observations, particularly of the conditions of poor working people and farmers. It is a classic of opinionated political polemic and of social observation, and was to some extent the inspiration for George Orwell's book "The road to Wigan Pier" which attempted to observe the state of the English working classes a century later. I digress...)

On the second Saturday in January we will be having a Wassailing, weather permitting. This, like Morris dancing, is an old custom which is being revived, and for much the same reasons. There are said to be pagan associations, but I’m not going to let that stop me as a Christian having some friends round for song and dance, a bonfire and a midwinter celebration. After all, Who made the apple tree? Orchards were wassailed, apparently, on Old Christmas Eve or Old Twelfth Night, so sometime in early January. If it’s not raining, we hope to enjoy ourselves as well as give thanks for the last years’ crop and look forward to next year’s.

Wassail is an Anglo-Saxon greeting meaning “good health” or “I wish you well”.