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Giving Gravel Orchard a new lease of life

Green Farm by Paul Lane

Reserves officer Dom updates us on the work to reinstate an orchard at Green Farm...

Julie waxed lyrical about the importance of orchards, both for wildlife and our folk memory in her awesome orchards blog back in January. I won’t try to repeat that here (I can’t compete with unicorns) but instead bring our focus back to Green Farm and the new orchard that we’ve been working on this year so far.

I say new but there has been orchard on this land on and off for around 200 years. The field that we’ve been creating our new orchard in has been called Gravel Orchard since the 1840s, insinuating that there was probably orchard there before. It's fairly obvious why orchards have been and continue to be such a valuable resource to us. To be able to not only gather a harvest, which will last throughout the dark and cold winter months without spoiling, but to also give extra grazing for your animals must have been hugely important to our ancestors.

Bunch of reddish apples hanging in a tree by Wendy Carter

Apples by Wendy Carter

We don’t know what this original orchard was made up of. Perhaps it was wild with crab apples, sloes and wild pears. Maybe there were orderly rows of cooking apples. Maybe the pigs would’ve been allowed in after the harvest to mop up any bruised fallen fruits. In the spirit of diversity for biodiversity, we’re opting for a mixed bag of apples, plums and pears for the newest version of the orchard. All will be heritage varieties that have been bred and grown in Worcestershire, with names like Lord Hindlip, yellow egg and Worcester black. There’ll be a mix of shapes too; some will only grow 12ft tall, others will exceed 20ft over time. This mix should mean that there’ll be a long window of blossom for early pollinators in spring and an even longer fruiting window in the autumn and winter for migrating birds like redwings. We’ve encouraged random planting with plenty of open space in between, so that the meadow underneath can be grazed and the trees have all the sun and nutrients they could want to grow into old age.

Apart from the bounty of blossom and fruit for wildlife, there’s a third reason why I was so keen to include an orchard in our restoration plans. Rotting and dead wood is a unique and wonderful habitat. It often goes unseen; buried beneath long grasses and bramble, enveloped inside a tree trunk, gently disintegrating under leaf litter. It welcomes so many invertebrates at different stages of their lives, from developing noble chafer beetle larvae to woodlice and earwigs. Time is the key, though. Only time can create this hidden kingdom and since Green Farm is right at the beginning of it’s journey, that’s going to take a while. Some trees develop deadwood quicker than others and fruit trees do just that. Fruit trees don’t live very long and some are only 40 years old by the time they have sections of dead heartwood in their trunks, flaky bark and rot holes. This contrasts to species like oak, which can take hundreds of years to do this! So our orchard will be providing deadwood much quicker than the other new habitats we’ll be creating. With it’s ancient hedgerows and neighbouring woodlands, Green Farm is already blessed with some deadwood but it doesn’t hurt to have a bit more.

Tree guard hurdle made by Wild Goose Rural Training

Tree guard hurdle made by Wild Goose Rural Training by Dominique Cragg

Wild Goose Rural Training Centre, who have been a key partner in the Green Farm project so far, planted 16 apple trees in Gravel Orchard at the start of January 2024. This was due to be 15 but one had suffered a bit of vole damage so the supplier kindly included a spare in case the damage was too much. All are growing well at the moment. They will be joined by 10 plums and five pears this winter. All of the trees are surrounded by tree guards, to protect them from further nibbling from small mammals, and a stake for support until they’ve grown a good root system. If there are grazing animals or deer about, it’s also a good idea to give them a livestock guard too. These can come in lots of different designs and ours are no different. Although the posts are new (so that they’re sturdy and should last a while), the stock netting we’ve used has been recycled from the leftovers of other planting projects. Our brilliant roving volunteers have been helping me to construct these recently and it’s now starting to look like a proper orchard!

There are still remnants of orchard nearby. Three pear trees live on in the hedgerows at Green Farm and commercial orchards lie just to the west. If there are any orchard specialists like noble chafer beetles in the area, hopefully they’ll be able to move back into Gravel Orchard in a few years!

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