The Apple Club Newsletter
Winter 2007
Apologies for the absence of newsletters over the summer and
autumn. Getting the time to put them together can be difficult. In any
case, we hope that you enjoy this edition. May we also wish you health
and happiness this Christmas, well in advance.
Christmas lights
As
you may remember, each Christmas for the past twenty years, we placed
Christmas lights on the large pine tree located at our entrance.
Because of the size of the tree, this required about 200 bulbs, each of
20 watts. The total power loading was about 4kW per hour.
Or to
put it in another way, the power we used for the outdoor Christmas
lights each year would be enough to run our electric forklift for about
40 days. While this is not huge, it is one of the few load factors that
we feel is unnecessary to the workings of our farm.
While our farm
is a net absorber of CO2, removing more greenhouse gases from the air
than it emits, we still feel that we need to do better. Therefore, on
environmental grounds, we have decided not to light our pine tree using
these lights this year. We do plan to investigate getting some low
energy LED lights as replacements, but they will not be here in time
for this year. We hope that you will enjoy your visit to our farm over
Christmas nonetheless.
An interesting contact
I recently
received an email from one Terry Yorke, from near Sidmouth in Devon. He
was tracking down the Woolbrook Pippin apple, of which we have an
example in our heritage varieties’ collection. He informed me that the
Woolbrook Pippin originated from close to Sidmouth, where it was bred
in 1903 by JH Stevens & Son, who had a nursery there. As a Cox’s
Orange Pippin seedling it has good taste, and was given an award of
merit by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1929.
In Sidmouth, they
are hoping to revive the apple in a small way, to make its heritage
part of the attraction of the village. I was glad to be able to provide
Terry with a photograph of the two apples remaining on the tree (I had
eaten the rest), and was also happy to learn more about this
interesting apple.
Another interesting contact
Email is
an amazing device. Another recent contact I received was from a citizen
of Iran; a Mr. Radmehr. He has a one hectare farm, which he plans to
grow apples on, and he was seeking advice on how apples are grown in
this part of the World. He provided me with a link to a webpage, and
there I could see a satellite image of his farm, which is situated in
the mountains of Iran, about 1200 metres above sea level (higher than
the top of Ireland’s highest mountain, Carrauntouhill).
Growing
apples in Iran is only possible in the mountains, as the lowlands are
too hot, and Mr. Radmehr informed me that in that part of Iran, quite a
lot of apples are grown on traditional large trees.
Indeed from the satellite photograph, it was possible to see trees, as well as roads, houses, farm buildings and so on.
I
hope to stay in touch with Mr. Radmehr, to give him as much help as I
can, and I am sure that I can learn a thing or two in the process of
our discussions too. Up to that email, I did not even know that quite a
lot of apples are grown in Iran.
Apple juice with added calcium:
We
have had a wonderful response to our new apple juice with calcium. The
number of people who now come to get it is quite remarkable. People who
are coming in tell me that their children don’t drink enough milk, or
are lactose intolerant, and say this is a great option. And of course
we also have people who drink it to reduce the risk of osteoporosis.
Update on the Australian drought
In
the spring newsletter I reported on a drought affecting the most
important agricultural area in Australia, and how that might affect
people in general and farmers in particular.
Now while it has been
summer in Ireland, it was winter in Australia, and they had hoped for
rain so that their reservoirs might be topped-up for the forthcoming
summer.
Indeed, there was a strong signal that rain might arrive,
because in El Nino* years, rainfall in this part of Australia is
lowered, and in normal years, increased. And since El Nino is not
occurring at the moment, it was predicted that winter rainfall might be
above average.
Unfortunately, significant rains did not arrive, and
a new report by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission reveals that
current water availability is the lowest it has been in 116 years of
modelling. The report also shows low rainfall and high temperatures for
August and September have caused water levels to drop by 150 billion
litres in one month.
Even more significantly, The Bureau of
Meteorology reported that this is the first time in their records that
an El Nino drought in the basin has not been followed by above-average
rainfall. The Commission's chief executive, Wendy Craik, says the
report shows climate change is transforming the river system, meanwhile
reporting that the rainfall in September is the least they've got for
the basin in their records since 1900.
In other words, global
warming is causing the weather in SE Australia to be drier, even
though, looking at normal El Nino cycles, it should be wetter. In
actual fact, water inflows are currently only about 13 per cent of the
long-term average.
The next report is due to be released in December, which is mid-summer in Australia.
However,
everyone agrees that the latest report on the availability of water in
the Murray-Darling Basin makes for grim reading and every Australian is
concerned.
The current outlook is that even if the drought
continues, cities are not expected to run out of water immediately.
However it is very hard on the farmers in particular, who in a lot of
cases have not been allocated any water. It is agreed that their
situation is dire, and the government has announced financial aid to
help their situations. However, the prospect of Australia needing to
import food is now being aired, and the consequence of this will be
increased prices in general.
Meanwhile, farmers with water
allocations have tough decisions to make. Some people plan to water
some of their best patches and say, 'well I'm going to try and survive
getting half my crop through', according to Ian Zadow of the irrigators
group. Others may say: 'I'll try and survive getting 25 per cent of my
orchard through to produce a crop, and let the other 75% die'.
There
are tough decisions which need to be made because of society’s
dependence on fossil fuels, and not all of these decisions need to be
made by Australia’s farmers. We all have a part to play.
* El Nino is a temperature cycle in the pacific ocean.
Book review:
A
new book on the risks associated with GM foods has recently been
published. It is authored by Jeffrey M Smith, and is written in an easy
format which can be dipped into for information at any time, or read
through for a good overview on the topic. The book has received great
reviews from many, and I highlight just a few:
“The ability to
introduce alien genes into a genome is an impressive technological
manipulation but we remain too ignorant of how the genome works to
anticipate all of the consequences, subtle or obvious, immediate or
long-term, of those manipulations. This book validates the concerns of
biotech critics who warned that our knowledge is too primitive to avoid
unexpected and deleterious consequences.”
—David Suzuki, geneticist, author of more than 30 books, awarded UNESCO prize for science.
“The most comprehensive, well-documented, and highly readable expos on the serious health dangers of GM foods.”
—Samuel
S. Epstein, MD, professor emeritus of Environmental Medicine,
University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and chairman,
Cancer Prevention Coalition.
“The process by which crops are
currently genetically engineered is a mutagenic process. Scientists
still have much to learn regarding the ramifications of putting
bacterial, viral or any other genes into the foreign context of a
plant’s DNA. For these and other reasons he describes in his book,
Jeffrey Smith believes the products of this mutagenic genetic
engineering process should be more thoroughly studied scientifically
and more thoroughly regulated—especially by the FDA—before they are
ever released into commerce. He’s absolutely right.”
—Belinda
Martineau, PhD, molecular geneticist, co-developer of the first
commercialized genetically engineered food crop and author of First
Fruit: The Creation of the Flavr SavrTM Tomato and the Birth of Biotech
Food.
I have purchased a few copies of this book in hardcover
format, and they are available from the farm for €27.95. I can also
send a copy with an internet juice order.
Apple Tree Pruning:
I have often been asked about how to prune apple trees, and I thought that a little advice might be of use.
I would suggest that the person doing the pruning bears the following in mind.
1. Remove dead and diseased wood.
2. Remove suckers (shoots coming up from the soil)
3. Try to keep the tree in a pyramidal shape; i.e. narrower at the top and broader at the bottom, like a Christmas tree.
4.
If possible, make the tree into three tiers; one wide at the bottom,
one less wide in the middle, and one narrow tier at the top.
5. Regulate the number of fruit buds . Remember, one of these buds can give up to five apples.
Do not leave stubs when pruning.
To reduce tree height (if desired) cut whole limbs out from the top.
Remove branches that make narrow angles with the main trunk.
Prune so that the top of the tree is narrower than the bottom.
Make thinning rather than heading cuts: i.e. cut back to the next branch; do not cut branches in half.
Picking apples, By Willem Traas
In
the spring I wrote about old age. Since then we have had a wet summer,
but still the crops were good. We had good strawberries from under the
protection of plastic covers, and the raspberries were plentiful too.
We made jam from the strawberries, and juice from the raspberries.
Next
came the plums; again they were very plentiful. I think that Opal is
the best plum, but Victoria is good too. We made jam from the plums too.
The apple picking is finished, and I will write about apple picking.
All
the trees are small now, and everything is picked without ladders. It
is interesting to see. We have a picking train. That is a tractor with
a little train of bins behind it.
It was different when I was young
in Holland. All our trees were very tall. Up to 7 metres. We had an
orchard like that when we came here first in 1967. There were Bramley
cookers and some old varieties.
At that time almost every farmer had
an old orchard. Our late neighbour, Paddy Hickey, who was one of the
first people to welcome us here, had an old orchard, and we rented it
from him for 2 years.
The picking had to be done with a ladder and
picking basket. And we put the apples in a heap with straw over them.
In the winter they became ripe, and you could eat them.
The poet Patrick Kavanagh had a small orchard at his farm in Co. Monaghan, and I was there.
The poet Robert Frost wrote a poem about apple picking.
It begins:
“My two-pointed ladder is sticking through a tree; towards heaven still”.
And he wrote about harvesting leaves:
“Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who’s to say where
The harvest shall stop?”
And W.B. Yeats wrote about silver apple and golden apples.
“And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.”
Did you know, we still have “Golden” apples. Have you ever heard of Golden Delicious?
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