Our wonderful orchard volunteers from Astra Zeneca spent a slightly rainy day in the orchard on 23rd April 2024. They achieved so much! They used all of their skills to work out how to put new picnic tables and raised beds together and get them installed. They also weeded around the apple trees and added a circle of mulch around them. Mulch can be anything from wood and bark chips to compost – even a thick layer of cardboard will help. The mulch prevents weeds from popping up and reduces water loss, and so keeps the trees from being stressed. Mulches such as compost or bark will also add some nutrients. The small-leaved lime trees also got some mulch. Finally they weeded the stool bed area and set it in to year 2 of the rootstock production cycle. So the orchard is looking gorgeous, all set for our Blossom Day Bank Holiday Monday 6th May 2 – 4pm, and for a lot of picnics throughout the summer. How come even a sandwich and a packet of crisps tastes so much better out of doors?
In September 2023, on a particularly hot day, this lovely group of Heineken Volunteers from the Star Pub came to make the orchard look tidy again. If you can, like me, remember advertising slogans from many years ago, my headline makes more sense. We are very grateful for all their hard work and community spirit. Our orchard depends on the dedication and support of volunteers, and we can never thank them enough.
(Health-and-safety note: it’s not a good idea to lean on your scythe blade, even wearing gloves. They are so sharp!)
Grafting is an ancient technique for propagating apple varieties. If you plant an apple pip of one variety, say a Histon Favourite, that pip will not grow up into a Histon Favourite apple tree. It will be a unique tree, maybe better, maybe worse. So if you want to get another Histon Favourite tree, you have to take some wood from the tree and somehow attach it to a rootstock. The rootstock helps to control the height and vigour of the tree. This process of ‘sticking’ the variety wood (the scion) to the rootstock is called grafting. Last week staff from Cambridge city council and a couple of orchard volunteers came along to learn about grafting fruit trees and practice their grafting techniques. It’s great to keep these skills alive. We also noticed the bees were very active, making natural honeycomb in the observation hive.
Many thanks to the magnificent team of Astra Zeneca employees who came down to the orchard and donated their own time and effort last week. They worked really hard, and the orchard looks amazing as a result. They weeded and mulched the circles around the trees, repaired the herb garden and waged war on the brambles. Astra Zeneca also donated some funds for the mulch and some other supplies, and we are very grateful for this help.
We took the hard decision not to hold a wassail (a traditional ceremony to honour the apple trees) this year. I know other orchards held large and enthusiastic wassails, but our space is small and we have to think about the potential risks.
But never fear, our Maintenance Session volunteers saw to it that the trees received their usual blessing of a libation of apple juice poured at their roots, and pieces of toast hung in the branches. When we started this orchard over a decade ago, our first wassail was three of the founders (including me) singing some kind of song and banging a saucepan, and a few neighbours came out to see what the racket was. Since then the wassail grew into a really sizeable and popular event, and we have had everything from lantern processions to a wheelbarrow orchestra to folk dressed as Green Men and Women, and as penguins. In the last few years wassailing has been re-discovered, re-invented and revived across the country (I think we were way ahead of the trend.) Wassailing is certainly a tradition of this orchard, and it will carry on, in some way or another, every year.
Trumpington Community Orchard cannot keep going without volunteer help and support, and we are so pleased that the Tzu Chi Cambridge Collegiate Society enjoyed their volunteering sessions with us, and are looking forward to more. The group have sent us these lovely photos, and one of the Society’s members, Yin, shared her thoughts:
“Contributing to environmental awareness is one of our objectives in forming the Tzu Chi Cambridge Collegiate Society. We are thrilled to start with volunteering in local community gardens. This week, we received a warm welcome from the Trumpington Community Orchard. It was blessed to have a sunny Sunday to put our hands in the soil. We happily meet new friends Susanna and Chris, our lovely local eco-warriors and knowledgeable green lovers. More than volunteering, we learned so much in the Orchard. It was our first time to know such varieties of Cambridgeshire heritage apples. The efforts that the Orchard team put in biodiversity and planting were much appreciated. Susanna also showed us how to recognize commonly seen plants in Cambridge, such as the cute yellow Buttercup, salad burnet, little white Yarrow, and Wood Anemone. It is interesting to see the small bird shed built for the swifts though now it is rented to the sparrows. By the place near Hobson Brook, we also learn about the Brook and Cambridge history. It is amusing to see so many fun things and activities happening in the Trumpington Community Orchard. We were surprised how vivid and lively the Orchard garden is after our volunteering session. We had a lovely time with Susanna getting ourselves close to nature and becoming more aware of our surroundings. We experienced a growth of a healthy mind to respect our environment and shared it with local nature lovers. We hope more friends will join us in the future. Step by step, we will adopt and share an environmentally friendly lifestyle as a community.”
‘The Tzu Chi Cambridge Collegiate Society is an active student society of Cambridge University. The Society is associated with the Tzu Chi Foundation, an international NGO and accredited observer of the United Nations Environment Programme. We share enthusiasm in nature awareness and in learning by doing through local community engagement. We believe that actions, however small, can make a difference and would like to create opportunities for like-minded fellows.’
As you probably know, Trumpington Community Orchard is managed by a very small core team of volunteers, with many other supporters helping out with maintenance and other activities (when we are allowed to have any). So we are pleased to welcome Chris Thane, who has lived close to the orchard for fifteen years, and has recently brought his skills to us in renovating our noticeboard and gate, and helping with our maintenance sessions. Chris hopes to add more information about our apple varieties to engage the passers-by going to the guided busway and new houses. Thanks to Chris and all our supporters for everything you do.
I love to have a relaxing Christmas, including sitting around watching terrible films, but there’s only so much of that I can enjoy before I begin to feel a bit like a Christmas pudding. If you get that feeling too come and join us on Monday 30 December 2019 for a Bramble Blitz and litter picking session. We will be starting at 10.30 am in the community orchard, and ending up with a free lunch of hearty soup and bread which will be served in the Clay Farm Community Garden building.
This event is supported with a grant from TKMaxx and Homesense.
Our orchard relies on voluteers, so we really do appreciate the efforts of everybody who turns up and helps out. In particular the Orchard team would like to say a big thank you to Anna who is volunteering for an hour every Tuesday between 8 am and 9 am. So far she has helped to rake up cuttings from the scythed meadow and dig out brambles and turns up whatever the weather with a willingness to help.
Be like Anna – Come along and see what you can do. You will leave feeling more warm and fuzzy than a Christmas jumper.
Don’t worry about our trees, I don’t mean the toothy, dam building type of beaver. Our orchard visitors were the 1st Trumpington Beaver Scouts (aged 6 – 8) , who came to the Orchard a few weeks ago and made a splendid job of a litter pick.
Just last Sunday (13.5.18) the 1st Trumpington Cub Scouts (aged 8 – 11) joined our regular volunteering session and spent most of their time removing brambles – a very prickly task!
We are really grateful for the enthusiasm, effort and help from these young people and their Leaders. We cannot keep the orchard looking good without the work of volunteers, and we hope that in return they learned a little about the orchard and its plants and insect life.
We welcome other group visits, we’ve hosted the Brownies and local schools as well, so do get in touch if you’d like to play a part in your local orchard’s growth.
OK I admit Spring is rather late this year. But the Orchard survived the ‘Beast from the East’ snow, and here and there blossom is cautiously unfurling. This website needs a bit of a spring clean, not least because of new data protection regulations that are coming into force in May 2018. This means that every organisation, no matter how small, has to ask its supporters to actively ‘opt in’ to receive emails and other contacts. So look out from an email for us soon, and please do take the time to stay in touch because we can’t keep the Orchard going without your help and interest.
Our Monthly Maintenance Mornings (Second Sunday and last Thursday of the month) have been off to a good start and so far we are scything the grass and getting rid of any bramble seedlings that have poked up through the ground. All are welcome to come to these – have a look at our Events page for all the dates and see the sign on the Orchard gate.