ANNUAL REPORT DECEMBER 2012



My report, like our harvest, is somewhat late this year.

My words in the former serve to butter no parsnips but the outcome of the fruit harvest is crucial to the well-being of the Tidnor Wood venture. Since we turned organic seven or so years ago, our aged trees have become increasingly biennial in terms of harvest tonnage - this was to be our profitable year. Mother Nature has had her own ideas about that. She has served up one of the wettest summers in living memory. Previous years have seen us praying for rain in order to swell our fruit and enhance our returns on the cider maker’s weighbridge. This year we have had the rain in abundance but a shortage of sunshine and the outcome of one without the other is apples the size of gob stoppers rather than something between golf and tennis balls.

Over a year ago I commenced the process of attempting to obtain planning permission for a worker’s cottage at Tidnor and the outcome of that has been a constant drizzle of obstacles. I knew that the process would not be a walk in the (orchard) park but I never imagined that it would be akin to kicking a hornet’s nest. NIMBY culture is fermenting well in our immediate neck of the woods but happily the leaders, a squeal of self-serving Barons, small landowners, and incomers like me, appear not to possess the guile that is endemic in true countrymen - the likes of our Ward Councillor and farmer Dave Greenow for example. Dave, a true supporter of Tidnor, loans us his organic sheep to graze off our sward and fertilize the orchard floor at the same time.

A worker’s cottage is all about succession planning; preserving Tidnor Wood Orchards as an orchard park and museum for the benefit of future generations. That has always been my objective. Having a skilled horticulturalist with his/her family living on site with primary allegiance to maintaining and developing the orchards, especially the National Collection® of cider apple varieties, seems to me to be the corner stone of sustainability. On a cold winter night when the television programming is poor you might consider an absorbing switchback ride, in the unlikely car of the Herefordshire Planning Portal, by typing in S113607/O at www.herefordshire.gov.uk/housing/planning/searchplanningapplications.aspx - and spare me a thought afterwards.

















KittenNot that there haven’t been amusing scenarios and delicious little ironies. A handmaiden of the meddlesome Barons persuaded the two ladies who run a cattery a mile or so away to write in an objection to the Planning Authorities. Their cottage with its concealed entrance is right beside a bottleneck in a narrow lane and traffic has been their ongoing nightmare for many years especially during rush hour rat runs. The handmaiden had only to intimate that a wealth of coaches would be visiting a vitalised Tidnor to send the two cat women into a right tizzy. This was the one story to move me to compassion and I wrote to them to try and put their minds at rest. I assured that their kitties would be quite safe as we had never entertained a coach at Tidnor and indeed, our car park was almost as small as theirs. Blow me if I didn’t receive an email from Belgian Jeanpierre Billen within a fortnight requesting that he bring a coach party to Tidnor in 2013 of members of Nationale Boomgaarden Stichting – an amateur fruit growing association. Sadly I felt morally obliged to politely and delicately turn him down.

         Wot - no coaches ???

I did wonder whether I should share with the cat ladies another traffic calming measure that I have been pursuing with the Planning Department. In lieu of a cottage a lucrative substitute that would ensure the economic survival of the orchards would be to re-invent Museum Orchard as a Garden (Orchard) of Remembrance. Our 400 plus museum trees would provide ideal headstones and the view across to the Sugar Loaf and Hay Bluff would enchant the mourners. A local business could offer a wreath service. It should be possible to achieve £250 for each internment (ashes only – no cadavers) and that would produce £1,000,000 for the first tranche. We could make it a condition that corteges took the circuitous route past the cattery.....................This idea is a resurrection and not a nativity. I put it to the now retired Bulmer apple expert Chris Fairs several years back and he said that the cider made from the funereal trees should be quite potable but in marketing terms it could be “the kiss of death”. Now there is a name for a cider brand to conjure with.

The biggest irony of this whole affair is that our proposed cottage, to be judiciously hidden behind our existing clutch of farm buildings, is an attempt to save as much of our 25 acres as orchards whereas without the cottage and the presence and skills of the occupants there is little doubt that we will have to start downsizing, Orchard of Remembrance apart, in the quite near future. That will mean major changes to the local topography.

I cannot bring this subject to a termination without commenting on two bright stars in our current firmament. Throughout the whole of this planning process, without much canvassing from me, I have had the support of the local Parish Council and had I not, our planning application would have been a dead duck long ago. And secondly, I have run out of superlatives for our Orchard Manager, Mike Law who has stoically held the fort – and much more besides - whilst my attention has been elsewhere.

 

On a more positive note our French venture has gone from strength to strength and we are currently holding our breath for the outcome of our application for the French equivalent of National Collection® status (CCVS -Conservatoire des Collections VegetalesSpecialises). We have over 200 varieties, again as half standards, in the ground at Les Vergers Tallevende. Because the aspect is good and the soil fertile and virgin as far as apple trees are concerned, so far our museum trees have been pretty well disease and predator free. Our Orchard Manager there, Graham Schofield, is a proven and experienced horticulturalist and his skill is obvious at a glance. I turn up at the orchards about three times a year and when I walk up and into the bottom orchard, the larger part of the collection, the trees always seem to me to be looking contented. Whereas Herefordshire cider apple trees are traditionally pruned to promote a leader the French are more ball shaped – I sometimes call them pom-pom trees. They can even look cute (senility is becoming a concern).

Lac dela Dathee with our land in the foreground




Les Vergers Tallevende are very close to the Lac de la Datheé which is a beauty spot that has been set up, with all the artistic skills that seem to come so naturally to the French, as an outdoor recreation park with boating, fishing, a walkway round the lake, an attached 18 hole golf course, a nature reserve and so on. The local maire has viewed our orchards as a welcome adjunct to the Lac and as mayors in France have considerable clout this bodes well for our project.

Two amazing sets of events have occurred these last twelve months with our French adventure.



                                                                                                                                                
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Lac de la Dathée with our land in the foreground

 
I bought the land for Les Vergers Tallevende some six years ago from an English couple who were in business running a 4x4 adventure circuit on eighteen acres of beautiful and diverse land that ran almost down to the lakeside. What made me look at a international property website in my  computer spam I have no idea, but I did, and I came across those eighteen acres fresh on the market. I recognised the land straight away so I immediately rang the couple, the owners, and they were at home. We did a deal then and there; I had history of course. Only many months later did I learn that I had cut out a whole swathe of French would-be investors. Monsieur le Maire did not turn white at my suggestion that I might one day put a cider house on one small corner of this land.




Mid-summer I was deliberately looking at French cottages for sale and I dropped onto a sleeper - I did not know it at the time - a snug, granite, detached cottage, needing little by way of renovation, on the edge of a hamlet on the opposite shore of Lac de la Dathée to the orchards. The weed carpet that had descended and overtaken the garden had hidden an amazing set of granite benches and edgings, a terracotta patio and much else.



 

Back at Tidnor, Simon, our resident cider maker, has been skipping along growing his business. Well, perhaps he is too long in the tooth to be physically skipping – the action relates more to the versatility of his ideas and ambition. Just his very presence round the orchard buildings is a boon to our orchard project in the vibrancy he brings with it.

I have enjoyed a convivial relationship with Dr. Peter Austerfield, Chairman of the Marcher Apple Network, over the years and he paid us the honour of arranging for the Network’s Annual Visiting Day to be held at Tidnor this last summer. His members are the heavyweights of orchard and fruit expertise in our part of the world and it was a compliment to us that they turned out in significant numbers. We were even more gratified to discover that their visit was described in a full page article in their prestigious annual magazine.

We have less than twenty new trees to plant in Museum Orchard at Tidnor this season. We lost a couple of youngsters in the drought last year and we are lucky that Paul Davis, our nurseryman in Llandeilo, still had their duplicates. The bulk of this year’s trees are a set of thirteen Dorset varieties that we sourced through John Worle Ltd. I have rather given up the search for “lost” old varieties but Richard Cheshire of M.A.N. has undiminished enthusiasm in that endeavour and he always includes us in his distribution list when he does occasionally unearth a find.

mini-Wedding_photo_2

Years ago we set up Tidnor Wood Orchards CIC (Community Interest Company) with the idea that the company, with its asset lock, would take up ownership of Museum Orchard and perhaps more. I have singularly failed to recruit a team of competent officers to take control of that company and relieve me of command. My very latest proposition has been to Herefordshire Council – Museum Orchard as a free gift to the People of Hereford and one that would obviate the need for planning permission for a cottage. Their silence is screaming in my ears.

National Collection® wise, as we seem to be losing the battle with predators and diseases with some targeted varieties, for the last few years we have threatened to take the Museum out of the organic scheme. Beyond that we are even looking into the realities of cloning the collection and effectively moving it to another region in the U.K. or perhaps to my land in France




That might give the Barons something extra to squeal about - or would they cheer?

Henry May

Knockmoyle November 2012


 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 
 
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