Most trees in the area we pick from are of the Newton Wonder
variety and most of them happened to be biennial meaning they only
crop every other year. So when we turned up it seemed like the day
would be a dead loss. Luckily though, one of the houses we visited
had a fairly prolific pear tree that we had forgotten about and one
of the Newton Wonders was cropping this year and was abundant. One
tree with delicious Spartans was late in ripening but I went back
and got them two weeks later. One of the volunteers also knew of 3
more houses with fruit trees to add to our list so we also got some
large Bramleys. Two of these houses had about 10 trees between
them! They had already dropped their fruit this year but next year
should be a bumper harvest if we get our timing right.
A total of 15 volunteers helped to pick 14 boxes of apples on one
day. These were distributed to:
- The Curry Project: Provides a free meals service for the
homeless, poor and underprivileged people of Bradford.
http://bradfordcurryproject.org/
- CALEB: One of the leading independent drug and alcohol agencies
in Bradford. http://www.calebbradford.org/who-we-are.php
- The Treehouse Cafe: Serving vegetarian, organic, fairtrade and
locally sourced food and is also a centre for non-violence.
http://www.treehousecafe.org/index.php/about-2/
From this year's experience I learnt it would definitely be a good
idea to ring houses before turning up to harvest to check the state
of the trees. I hadn't taken into account that some trees would be
biennial and that weather conditions would alter the timing of the
harvest.
Thanks to my mum for providing soup at lunch!