Our family have been growing fruit and vegetables on our traditional Market Garden near Bidford-on-Avon, since 1901, and we still have the very first rent book.
Here we are taking Newton Wonders home, stacked up on the old tractor trailer. This olden variety could be carefully stored over winter and through into the New Year at a time when giant cold stores weren’t available and fresh apples could not be bought. We have enormous trees still standing in the orchard, so tall that even with our tallest ladders we can’t reach the apples on the top.
My late father picking Discovery Apples into a traditional wicker basket while the next generation of apple pickers are precariously perched at the top of the ladder wondering if he’ll catch us if we slip.
Two budding farmers trying to work out the best route through the orchard without knocking over a tree or two on our old 1957 Massey Harris Ferguson. This is still our one and only tractor, used to duck underneath the branches of the trees when mowing the orchards every year since it arrived in the late 1970s.
Planting out some two year old plum trees. These will have been locally grown, grafted to a standard orchard sized rootstock, or perhaps grafted to a sucker a couple of years prior and now being transplanted in late winter.
Merrylegs Apple Juice
The Market Garden, Barton, B50 4NP
enquiries@merrylegsapplejuice.co.uk
01789 867262