My work with trees hasn’t really involved fruit trees for food production. Mostly it has focused on safety or development, and having an abundance of fruit dropping onto the highway every year isn’t normally celebrated.
The closest I had got was monitoring one of Newton’s apple trees at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, or listening to people’s complaints about blossoms messing up their driveway. My interest in orchards really took off when I moved into a house that backs on to a neglected veteran orchard and from that I started to help a group in the village set up a community orchard.
Knowledge refresher
Last year I got the opportunity to combine two of my favourite things in a course – food and trees! The course was the CICO Pro Level 3 (Certificate in Community Orcharding) in London, run by The Orchard Project.
One of the things I was really looking forward to was being able to do a course that was just for me: to learn and refresh some of that old forgotten knowledge without the pressures of work. The course was only six months long (April-October), with the work based on short assignments and quizzes. We met in person around once a month for our practical sessions, which were backed up with online content. All of these things made it really achievable and easy to fit around the rest of my life.
The course covered some of the following topics: planting, pruning, pests and diseases, fruit ID, orchard history, surveying, veteran orchards, propagation and group work. I think my favourite module was orchard history, which allowed me to get lost down a rabbit hole and to geek out history-style. As someone who’s very hands on and hates sitting down for too long, I also loved the grafting and pruning practical sessions.
Discovering rare fungus
I was lucky enough to be on the course with an amazing group of people that gelled from day one. As you can imagine for people interested in trees, it was a very eclectic bunch and they added so much to my experience. One of the highlights happened in the last in-person session, which was the veteran orchard class with Russell Miller. We stumbled across a rare fungus growing on a veteran Phoenix apple, the orchard toothcrust (Sarcodontia crocea).
There are only 22 records on the NBN atlas for England, so we couldn’t believe our luck when we found it! It’s an annual that grows from a few centimetres to one metre square. As you can see from the picture above, it looks like something from under the sea and is cream-yellow-brown in colour. The fresh fruiting bodies are supposed to smell of pineapple or grated apple. One of the reasons this fungus is so incredibly rare is the decline of our old orchards.
As arbs, we know how precious our veteran trees are, but do we really consider the value of our veteran orchards? For me it really hit home how much we have to start fighting for our old orchards and ensuring new ones are planted and properly managed for the future.
I really enjoyed the course and recommend you get involved in The Orchard Project or your local orchard. If this has sparked your interest, find out more about our accredited courses. We plan to run our next CICO Pro course in autumn 2024 – email for more information and to join the waiting list.
by Michelle Ryan, Chair of the Arboricultural Association
First published in the Arboricultural Association’s ARB Magazine (issue 200, spring 2023). This abridged version is kindly reproduced here with permission.