The quiet of the orchard

An English summer.

In years gone by, any break I managed to snatch mid-afternoon was either to sit on an upturned bucket out the back of the kitchen door and chain smoke a few cigarettes or wander off to the park to have a snooze for fifteen minutes, drink two double espressos and perhaps find a moment to eat a sandwich. A potential thirty minutes squeezed into sixteen hours never really amounted to much after changing and walking ten minutes to the shop, so the reality of any break was usually the upturned bucket option.

Oh, the glamour.

After lunch today I took a walk through the orchard here to check the beehives. It’s a magical place. It’s been beautiful, watching the seasons change over the last twelve months, from last autumn’s harvest with its abundance of ripe fruit that we crushed to make different varietals and blends of juice. We made litres of raw apple cider vinegar, fermented through the winter and bottled in spring. We left the windfalls to rot into the ground to fertilise the trees through the coming months. Wasps drunk on fermented fruit late into the year, and then through the winter with the pruning done during the frosts, all lay deeply frozen for a month or so. The trees deep asleep in the silvery blue light of winter.

With the arrival of spring comes trees full of white and pink blossom, new shoots and bud break. Now as I walk this afternoon, I see young fruit, already heavily clustered on the trees, with wildflowers and long grasses quietly moving in the afternoon breeze.

Apples for later in the year