Many people dream about giving up the day job to pursue their passion, but few do. However, when the company where he’d worked for 25 years was about to be sold, Ken decided it was the perfect opportunity to make his move.
“I had a very busy job as a company director that involved a lot of travel and took up most of my time,” he explained. “I’d always fancied planting a cider apple orchard and making good cider one day. I realised I didn’t want to work full-time anymore, and it was about time I took the next step and just got on with it!”
Ken, who lives just south of Bristol, in Portishead, is a graduate from our first Certificate in Community Orcharding Course (CICO) in Bristol in 2023. He proudly showed our current students around his cider orchard this autumn, where he hosted a juice tasting session.
It is located on a field of just over an acre he bought in March 2024, within walking distance of his home. He has planted 45 trees so far, a mix of mainly cider apples, with crab apples and eating apples. Some of the trees had been patiently waiting in pots in his garden for five years while he worked on making his dream a reality, and included two that he grafted while on the CICO course: Pig Aderyn, a bud grafted Welsh cider apple, and a chip bud grafted Jonagold.
Ken discovered The Orchard Project course after an online search brought him to our website. “The land sale was taking longer than planned, so I had time to get in some training,” he explained. “I’m a keen gardener and was looking for something that would help me get some additional skills to help with the orchard. The more I saw and read on the website, the more interested I was in doing it, so I signed up and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was really great, and so handy that it was local for me to attend. We had people join from everywhere – Liverpool, Devon, Milton Keynes, all over. I’m still in touch with some of them today.
“For me, the best bit by far was the practical, hands-on experience. Just putting a tree in front of somebody and saying, ‘here, plant this’, or giving them a knife and saying ‘cut this in this way’, is great. You can get a lot from videos and books, but to meet up once a month where you have a session together and can talk about things and practice really made a difference to me. Once you’ve done things like that, it gives people the confidence then to take it on themselves.”
It’s fair to say that Ken’s first foray into cider making was a success, picking up a Bronze medal in the newcomer category at the Royal Bath and West Show! As each entry has to be made from apples from the previous year, and cider tends to improve if stored for a year or more, Ken was pleased with this result as he’d only been able to make his cider four months beforehand.
“Making cider is quite easy,” he says. “But making really good cider is the hardest part. You’re worrying all the time ‘have I got this wrong? Is it any good?’ It’s like having your first child; you might get it wrong. But you need to wait it out and be patient and hopefully it will sort itself out, even if it takes decades!”
He’s just about to bottle 200 litres of cider this season, and while only 1% of the apples in this batch came from his own trees as they are still young, the rest came from a 30-year-old orchard nearby that he helps to manage for SENDsenses, who specialise in providing outdoor sensory sessions for children with additional needs.
Ken has also just started as one of the first cohort of trainees on our new Consultant Development Programme, which is designed to provide people with the skills they need to work as freelance orchardists for The Orchard Project and other organisations.