Our First 2 Apple Trees from Blackmoor Nurseries

Apple Trees from Blackmoor Nurseries 

I'd like to introduce you to the very first trees for the Didcot Orchard Town Project, I purchased them from www.Blackmoor.co.uk for £25 each, Bargain!

Ordering

I decided to buy online after checking my local Garden centre and finding only one variety of apple tree there. Before deciding on Blackmoor I done extensive research and found that there are a lot of websites to choose from. What made me ultimately choose Blackmoor was a combination of easy to use website, comparatively good prices, extensive range, good product information and being able to deliver the trees all year round. Some of the other sites would only deliver the trees when they are in dormancy (Winter) and me being impatient, wanted them now! 

The Trees

St Edmund's Pippin

I chose two different varieties, a new variety called Fiesta AGM and an old english variety called St Edmund's Pippin, they will be ready for picking in September and October. Hopefully they will pollinate each other as neither variety are self fertile. Both varieties are 2 year old trees on M26 rootstocks so will grow be medium sized trees, roughly 3-4 metres tall when fully grown. However I don't plan on letting them grow that tall, otherwise we'll need a ladder to pick the apples.

Fiesta AGM

Also, when you order you get a choice of either bush, fan, cordon or espalier trained trees. I chose bush for both because i want to train/prune these trees to have an open centre (I'll write blog on training/pruning soon). Initially my plan for these trees is to grow them to a good size in pots and take cutting from them to graft to the rootstocks i'll be purchasing this winter.
Once i have secured the varieties on the rootstocks we will be planting them somewhere in Didcot.

Delivery

Flowers have fallen after pollination

Little Apple

When the trees arrived only 1 week after payment i was shocked by the size of the boxes they came in. They were huge! You will see from the picture that the two trees i received look to have been trained in 2 completely different ways but both are healthy so i'm not going to complain (life is too short to waste time moaning about imperfections). As you can see from these pictures, the trees have already flowered this year and we already have apples growing! Overall I'm very happy with Blackmoor and will be ordering some new varieties soon.

  And Here they are!

These will both be repotted into much larger pots to give the roots room to grow

 I hope you enjoyed the pictures

~ Mark

Theoretical Financial Benefits to the Didcot Economy

Theoretical Financial Benefits to the Didcot Economy

Please excuse the fancy title, basically I want to demonstrate how this project might affect our town financially. In the spirit of keeping it simple, I'm still only working with the Apple theme at the moment. Without further ado here are some interesting numbers.

The Numbers

On Average an apple tree will bear about 100 apples per year (This is based on a, medium sized, 5-10 year old tree)

Didcot's population is currently around 26,000 people (This figure is really hard to come by but in 2001 census it was 22,762 so I've done a bit of guesswork here)

The retail price of apples range from 20p - 50p each (Note: We are aiming to grow the best apples!)

The Sums

If we wanted to grow enough apples so each person in Didcot gets 1 apple a year we would need 260 apple trees. If those apples had a value of 50p each, the whole lot would be worth £13,000. Even if we only managed to produce apples worth 20p each, they would still have a value of £5,200 (A highly unlikely situation). 

As part of the Ladygrove Loop development the South Oxfordshire District Council planted 1,800 trees. Lets for a minute imagine that they had planted apple trees and those 1,800 apple trees all produced 100 apples each, giving us 180,000 apples in total. That works out to be 6.9 apples each for every person in Didcot and if they were priced at 50p each that would be a total value of £90,000. Now lets not forget that these apple trees will produce fruit every year. 

So potentially as a town we could already be saving £90,000 per year, if the Council had planted apple trees instead of the other species. 

Ladygrove Loop Connection

I don't want to get too involved into the politics, and please don't get me wrong I think for the most part the Ladygrove Loop has been a success and is a great asset for Didcot, but I would like to point out that the Ladygrove Loop cost £395,000. I assume (Don't quote me on this as I don't know for sure) it was paid for by our Council Tax Contributions, so basically the people of Didcot paid for it. Had the Council planted apple trees and given the apples produced (180,000) to the people of Didcot for free (£90,000 per year) then the project would have paid for itself within 5 years (in the form of free apples). 

Conclusion

I hope you found those figures interesting and  i've given you a glimpse of the financial benefit we could all share as a result of this project. There are lots of other things to consider such as maintenance, environmental effects, distribution/transportation (of the apples), disease and pests, vandalism and more (I'm sure). All of which we'll cover at a later date.

Thanks for reading

~Mark

The Idea for the Orchard Town

Hello and Welcome

My name is Mark and I'm concerned with the rising CO2 levels around the World. I believe that we all should try to do more to reduce our impact on the environment. As you know, many people are already taking steps to do this in the form of renewable energy and recycling but these are expensive. Another way  of reducing CO2 levels is by doing something that will be carbon positive such as planting trees or painting your house with photocatalytic paint. There are lots of ways we can do things to reduce CO2 levels, I believe that the hardest part is the Doing or more to the point getting other people to Do it too. This is why we must come up with new ideas that makes being green more natural and less of a chore. In fact if people can benefit from being green then there is even more reason to do it!

As well as being Concerned about the environment, I would like to see more positive things happening in my Local Community. I come from Didcot, a small growing town in the south of Oxfordshire and i am concerned that as the town grows we will slowly lose the sense of community that we currently feel. I recently went to London and felt sad at the way people treat each other, they don't speak to each other and basically ignore eachother. I don't want to see my town end up like that and i don't want my children to live in that kind of environment.

So, instead of waiting for someone else to solve these problems for me, i began searching for inspiration.

I live in a part of Didcot called Ladygrove, it is a fairly new estate with lots of green space. To be honest it is already a good model for the future with lots of footpaths (known as yellow brick roads) through the green areas that are adorned with  ornamental shrubs and trees. Recently the Local council installed "The Ladygrove Loop". The Ladygrove Loop is a fitness trail, that has many exercise machines, which runs along the yellow brick roads throughout the ladygrove estate. It's basically a free outdoor gym for the local people.
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One day whilst on the Ladygrove loop i notice a few people out picking blackberries from the the numerous bushes that grow all over the estate. This got me thinking, why not have more fruits dotted around for the people to pick? And my idea was born...

The idea is to plant small scale orchards within Didcot to provide Local organic food to the population. The Aim is for the People of Didcot to get involved in the planting and maintaining of different fruit trees in order to provide themselves with healthy, free, organically grown fruit and a friendlier community.

The orchards will provide local people with an opportunity to get involved with their local community working as a team to manage the project. The Orchards themselves will be family friendly with local children being encouraged to take part through school projects. The Orchard will provide an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the life cycle of plants and their relationship with other species. Families can enjoy the experience of growing fruit together and when it is ripe and ready they will get to take some home with them.

The Trees will be grown naturally without the use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser resulting in healthier food and a healthier environment. As we know Trees are good for the environment, they help to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Fruit tree in particular help reduce CO2 emissions further, by growing the fruit locally the need to import fruit from other countries will be reduced. Reducing the CO2 emissions from supply chains will be better for the world not just Didcot.

Excess fruit can be donated to local charities that focus on feeding the poor. Also value can be added to fruit by processing into higher value goods such as Jam and then sold to raise funds for further development of the project.

As you can see there are many benefits to the project and i'm sure you have probably thought of some new ideas already. I would hope that other groups within Didcot would like to get involved in different ways, perhaps the Womens institute would like to process some fruit into Jam or a school may want to plant their own orchard onsite. The possibilities are endless. I hope you are interested and will continue to follow this blog and get involved.

Thank you for reading

~Mark