Decades of difference

7 March 2025 (Friday)

Woke up remembering that I was going to be helping prune the cider orchard at the allotment site today... my heart sank, a little.  I'm going to be doing it with the guy who makes the cider from the apples of our trees, and hoping that a couple of others will turn up as well.  It wasn't that I didn't want to do it, it was just that I didn't really feel like doing it today, but it was in the diary, so…

Doing a bit of work at my desk early on, I got a call from The Compost Centre (such nice guys!!!) to say that the bags of compost that I’d ordered about six weeks ago we're going to be delivered today…and then I remembered there's also a skip being delivered today at the allotment, which will be available for plotters to fill up over the weekend. At this point everything was feeling a little bit overwhelming. 

After breakfast, I got down to the allotment site and the skip had already been delivered. Yay!!

I wasn't actually the one ordering the skip this time, so none of that organisation nor anxiety of if it would, when it would, would the driver be decent or frosty, fell to me. It's funny, maybe 10 years ago I wouldn't have had anxiety around things like I do now. I remember when my parents were in their 60s and they would get anxious about this or that, I’d say to them “Oh, don't worry about that.  It's not a problem” or “Oh, I don't know why you're concerned about that”. And now, three decades on, I find I'm treading regularly in those anxiety footsteps of my parents, and have been for many years now.  I'm not sure whether it's just the world moving too fast, or insecurity about doing things at my age that a decade ago I’d just have been a snip.  But I appreciate my parents more and more as I get older… not in fits and jumps, but in a slow and happily progressive understanding of the life and knowledge they passed on through their words and actions; this understanding is rather comforting, as with ice cream slowly melting over hot apple pie.

Anyway…

After a little bit of weeding on the plot, a shout from a fellow plotter “Your man’s here!” and off to the gate I went… my fellow pruner had arrived and it was time to get to the site’s orchard. 

The trees haven’t been managed for a very long time.  Four of them are of a variety that is particularly vigorous, and they’ve grown both too tall and too broad in the canopy. The area of the orchard is only three plots and has about 15 trees, so they’re packed a tad closer than is desired. I’m told the original idea was that they’d be kept pretty tight, with short productive branches and not allowed to grow beyond two meters in height. The guy who had these plots, and planted this orchard of apple trees almost two decades ago, himself succumbed to the decades.  As he got older he was simply unable to manage the trees in the way they needed, both his mobility and health got in the way.  The trees, largely unchecked, grew… and spread… and grew.  Unless you're a tree, getting older isn’t much fun… maybe for some it is, though for most so many challenges arise that our younger selves would just shrug off, or put on our big boy pants and get on with.

Anyway…

These trees were pruned a little a few years ago, though they needed a concerted effort; we really needed to get into the trees and cut them back. Fortunately, this is what my fellow pruner and myself did, and the orchard looks significantly thinner now than it did when we began. Stupidly, as often happens with me, I didn't take any before shots so I’ve only the after shots. What’s clear from the arisings i.e the prunings of the trees, is that quite a lot has come off. We even took three or four large crowding limbs down, each about 15 foot long. 

There were two main jobs planned: opening up the crown of the trees which had become relatively crowded out with growth, and cutting back the canopy of the most rigorous of the trees by about a third as they were encroaching into their neighbouring trees - canopy shyness was not a thing here!

I think we did a really good job, starting at 10.30am and then finishing around 1.15pm. In the end it was just myself and the cider man who were available to do it, though we cracked on and did the job, and did it well.

Of course, there was a lot of arisings in a pile that will need to be processed at our next work social. Now, when I say processed, I mean the smaller branches of these prunings will be cut off and laid into a dead hedge, though the dead hedge may actually need to be another one that we create, just around the corner from the current one in the orchard as it’s pretty full already.

Getting back home at around 1.30pm, I was pretty hungry. I’d taken a flask and a biscuit with me but just hadn't had time to have a break.  So when I came in the door and Richard told me to wash my hands because he had a burger for me to try it was a big “Oh, yes please!”

He's been really keen to create a burger from soya mince for some time, and the trial that he gave me was rather tasty, with a lovely crisp outside and soft inside. He wants it to be firmer inside than it was, so I can see more trials to come, which will be delicious! 

I went back to the allotment in the afternoon for an hour or so to just carry on with weeding, and then it was time for Richard’s Live at 6pm, before we had a swift broad bean and pesto pasta supper and sat down to some telly.


Weather:  Sunny much of the day, and warm - around 15°.  Slightly cloudy from late afternoon.

Breakfast:  Bran sticks, yogurt, sultanas and sliced banana
Lunch:  Richard's trial soya burger, pitta, grated carrot and fried smoked tofu
Supper:  Frozen broad beans, some water, a chunk of garlic, and a tablespoon of miso slowly stewed and a half jar of Lidl pesto added at the end.  Had with wholewheat spaghetti and grated cheddar.