Traditional Orchard but on a small scale


Blackthorn a plenty
In late 2020, I was lucky enough to be offered the chance to create a small Orchard in rural Suffolk. This blog will follow my journey and pool together all the experiences, research and discoveries I have made along the way. 

Byng Brook Orchard is going to be maintained as a traditional orchard1 but on a small scale. The orchard is on a corner of a friend's farm and is about 300m22 and I hope to create something that provides some of the benefits that a traditional orchard offers but on a small scale. If this works to create a bio-diverse environment for lots of lovely creatures and plants then maybe I can inspire others to do the same with their little strips of land.

One of my inspirations for this is Orchard: A Year in England's Eden by Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates3.  They write of an orchard in Herefordshire which they surveyed over the months of a year to see the flora and fauna that flourished there. An orchard like the one they studied is sadly a rarity in today's England.   The orchard of our past was a melting pot of habitats; dead or decaying trees, long grass, tough scrub, huge wild hedgerows, log piles, fallen fruit, boggy bits, dry bits.  A little bit of heaven for everybody's taste.

Now I understand that the food needs of the masses require us to farm in a way that provides huge amounts of produce at supermarket standards and the human power required to work the farm in a traditional way at that scale is nigh on impossible in the modern age.  But wouldn't it be a fine effort if our generation could attempt to improve our little bits of land by letting them be a bit more wild.  Allow nature to guide us. 
Perhaps it will take me years to arrive at the picture in my head of a scruffy but abundant orchard but it will hopefully be an interesting journey along the way.






1 Traditional Orchards are defined, for priority habitat purposes, as groups of fruit and nut trees planted on vigorous rootstocks at low densities in permanent grassland; and managed in a low intensity way.↩

2  A whopping 20% of an acre!↩

3  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48836406-orchard↩


Comments

  1. Unknown12 January 2021 at 10:20

    Hi Blake - Have you come across Suffolk Traditional Orchards (STOG) and Orchards East? They are very helpful. I'm not too far from Byng Brook!

    ReplyDelete

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