The Apple Club Newsletter

Summer 2004

What a great summer for fruit. And it’s only just getting started. The strawberries are in full swing, the raspberries are about to begin, and the plums will be ready by August. It’s definitely time to visit the farm, and a good time to read the newsletter too. I hope that you enjoy it.

Cahir farmers’ market

All of us at the farm are delighted to be associated with Cahir Farmers’ Market. As well as offering us a place to sell some extra produce, it also affords us the opportunity to buy some top-class foods.
A new stallholder has recently taken up residence there, so now there are two stallholders who make the most delicious breads, cakes, and confectionaries.
As well as this, there are locally made cheeses and sauces, free-range eggs, a wide diversity of fresh fish (including shellfish) and fish pies, organic pork, beef and lamb, and vegetables and fruits also.
And because everything is locally produced, you can rest assured that there haven’t been trucks criss-crossing the country and creating all sorts of pollution to get your food to you. (This is known as the issue of food miles, and you can read more about this in the next article).
Cahir farmers’ market is open every Saturday from 9am to 1pm.

The Farmer’s Journal

We were very pleased to get a front-page photograph in The Farmer’s Journal edition of June 19th. Back in 1989 their photographer, Tony O’Gorman, called into our farm and took a picture which made the front page, and he has called in every now and then since. We are delighted to be featured on the front page once again, and perhaps we’ll make it once again in 2019. Hopefully the strawberries will be just as good then.

A Bord Glas award

Our farm had another good year in the Bord Glas and National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI) quality awards last year. At the recent awards ceremony in Dublin, the farm won the outright award for Munster, having scored 100% in the audit procedure. A special certificate was awarded by Minister Noel Treacy, who noted that The Apple Farm had scored consistently well over the years, having also won the National Award for fruits in 2000.

Raspberry Beret

When Prince wrote his famous song about the raspberry beret, implicit was a recognition by the musician of the unique colour of the fruit. It was not the first recognition of this fruit in music, and indeed there was even a band that bore the name Raspberries, and if you are a child of the early seventies, you may even remember their hit “Go All The Way”. Certainly the raspberry has come a long way for a fruit that has only been cultivated for 500 years.
That is not to say that the raspberry wasn’t consumed by humans until then. It seems most likely that it has been eaten for as long as humans have been around, or at least where it was available. And according to the plant historians, this was Asia, although there is also evidence of types that are native in the Western World also.
Roman records of raspberries date back to the 4th century, but it does not seem that they were cultivated then. Instead, it is believed that it may have been the crusaders, who wrote about a delicious fruit with sweet strong aroma that they encountered on their way to Jerusalem, who brought them back with them. This would relate well with the evidence that cultivation only began in the 1600’s in France and England, and then later in North America.
The first written mention of raspberries in English is in a book on herbal medicine which dates to 1548. And it seems that the herbal doctors were quite correct, as modern science has borne out their confidence in this little fruit. The range and potency of antioxidants in raspberry has been proven, and these components help prevent damage to the cells of humans (and animals). Also, the raspberry has antibiotic properties, which means that it aids against irritable bowel syndrome and other infections. As well as this, research with animals has shown that raspberries have the potential to inhibit cancer cell proliferation and tumour formation, especially in the colon. And finally, raspberries, and a tea made from raspberry leaves are said to relieve the nausea associated with pregnancy, and even to assist with an easier delivery.
Raspberries are part of the rose family, and it is from there that they get their slight prickles, though they are not barbed like their close relatives, the blackberries. Each fruit is in actual fact an aggregate of many tiny fruits called druplets, each of which has a separate seed. Apart from red raspberries, there are purple, orange, yellow, white and even black types, though at our farm we only have the red type.

Food Miles

Food and Farming campaign group “Sustain” recently issued a report entitled "Eating Oil: Food supply in a changing climate."
The central argument of this report is that buying food that has had to travel to get to your plate mops up fossil fuel in its transportation and distribution. Both international and national transportation of food is criticised. Even home-produced food now has to travel twice as far to get to the supermarket shelf compared with 1978. (I have ample experience of this as follows: if I wish to supply strawberries to Tesco in Clonmel, they must be delivered to the Dublin depot. This means fruit would have to travel 250 miles to do the ten mile journey from Cahir to Clonmel, an utterly wasteful practice, which means that the fruit you get will also be a day older than necessary). In fact, between 33% and 40% of road freight is now due to food being transported.
Sustain argues that this means that the food supply is inefficient and unsustainable.
Take a strawberry for example: An average strawberry might contain 10 calories. However, to fly it here from California takes twenty times more energy than this. What a waste of aviation fuel. And I am sorry to report that at the height of the Irish season, supermarkets were importing American fruits, both last year and again this year.
Even in the case of the much more efficient ocean transport, for every calorie of vegetable shipped from New Zealand, an equivalent amount of oil is burned in getting it here.
Road transport is of intermediate efficiency. To get an apple from Italy to Ireland by road takes as much energy as to get it from China to Rotterdam by ship.
Of course, none of this is sustainable. Report author Andy Jones has said that the food system has become almost completely dependent on oil. One shopping basket of 26 imported items travelled 241,000km and released as much Carbon Dioxide as would cooking for a family of four for six months.
Sustain said the one way to reduce food miles is by choosing seasonal, home-grown products, and by buying direct from the farmer. On average, this option is 50 times more energy-efficient than purchasing imports.

Recipe: Strawberry-Philadelphia-Crush

Preparation time: 10 minutes, serves 6, no cooking required

Ingredients:
500g strawberries and/or raspberries
150ml cream
200g Philadelphia cheese
3 tablespoons caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla essence
6 tablespoons peach schnapps (or apple juice)
6 individual meringue nests

Method:
Wash and slice the berries and divide between six bowls, keeping a few whole berries for decoration.
Put one teaspoon of schnapps into each dish. Whip the cream until it just holds its shape, then mix with Philadelphia, sugar and vanilla.
Break the meringue nests into smallish chunks and fold into the mix.
Spoon into dishes. Drizzle each desert with the remaining schnapps, and decorate with the remaining berries.

In the fruit garden

Raspberries
Your raspberries should really do well with the dry weather we have had. However, there is probably an abundance of young cane appearing now too. Some of this will need removing, so take out the weaker ones to leave about eight new canes per metre of row.
If you have had trouble with birds eating your fruit in the past, now is the time to get some netting ready.

Strawberries
Again, with the good spring and summer, strawberries should also be doing well. There should not be any fruit rots, and slugs should be scarce.

Apples and Plums
If you are lucky you should see plenty of fruit, and now is the time to do your thinning. If you leave too many fruits on the tree, none will taste well, so remove the smaller ones by hand, leaving one plum on every two inches (5cm) of branch, and one apple per four to six inches (10-15cm) of branch.
Due to the dry humid weather, mildew has been common on apple. You can identify this as a white powdery substance on some shoots and leaves. This can be tackled with a chemical such as sulphur if you use an organic approach. Alternatively, you could prune off infected shoots, which we find effective at this time of year.

Old Strawberries, By Willem Traas

In our last newsletter I wrote about old tractors. The ones we used in Holland, and farmers used in Ireland. You remember the names Ford, Massey Ferguson?
This time I will write about the strawberries we grew in Holland, and then in Ireland.
My father grew strawberries as far back as I can remember, and that is 1939! Just before the Second World War.
The fruit variety was a strawberry with the name Madam Fefebre. It was a small sour strawberry. But it ripened before the others, and that was good. As children we began looking for the first ripe fruit at least two weeks before they were ready to eat.
The next variety was Madam Moutot. It was a large soft strawberry and it went bad easily and the slugs loved it too.
The last variety was named Jecunda. This one was not so much for eating fresh but for jam-making. The strawberries were washed and put into big wooden barrels that would hold thousands of them. The strawberries were preserved by adding sulphite.
These were the three main varieties when I was a child. I think they came from France.
After the war new varieties came from Germany but I do not remember their names. The only variety I remember is Senga Sengana. It was a completely red-fleshed strawberry. My father and I had a few acres of them.
Then in the time just before we came to Ireland we grew a lot of Red Gauntlet. It originated in Scotland.
When we came to Ireland we grew Climax, Cambridge Vigour and Cambridge Favourite, but we do not grow these any more. We began to try other varieties like Regina, Elvira and Elsanta. We called Elvira, Daniella, after Dan Hogan from Tipperary. Elsanta is still grown widely in Ireland. New varieties are also being introduced.
Which one tastes the best? It is not easy to tell. If you come to the farm I can tell you more about them and you can taste them for yourselves. Or you could ask Harry O’Brien, our horticultural advisor. But he lives in Carlow and I live here in Moorstown.


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