November Working Party

Beautiful autumn day for a working party, and a good turn out. There was a bit of general maintenance of the mini food forest areas, but our main focus was on enlarging the pond/scrape/boggy areas in the mini nature reserve.

We have decided to dig these scrapes a bit at a time, and see how much they fill up and where the water table sits throughout the year. This means we may decide to dig a bit more out next Autumn, but for now this size/depth feels like good progress. We sprinkled a wetland/pond margin seed mix around the edges and we plan to raise some plants from seed to add to the wetland in the Spring.

Elsewhere on site, we spotted a few bees, wasps and frogs out and about…

And, in our Community Orchard, the medlars are now ripe – so we had a bit of a tasting. Medlars aren’t grown that much nowadays: they were very popular in Roman and Medieval times, and it may be premature to claim that they are enjoying a bit of a resurgence but we’ll give it a go.

When we planted the orchard, we included a medlar precisely because they are so rare. Medlar fruits have to be ‘bletted’ (left so that they turn brown and soft) before you can eat them – but this is the first year they’ve got to this point while still on the tree (usually we pick some and leave them in a bowl to ripen). They’re described as tasting somewhere between baked apple and date, which isn’t too far off.