Get ready for Apple Day

Saturday 16 October is the big day for apples. Photo:©Growing Communities

Apples: D’Arcy Spice, Pixie, William Crump, Peasgood Nonsuch, Foxwhelp and Major… What’s not to like? Just a handful of the several thousand varieties of British apples with names as diverse, delightfully quirky and endearingly pompous as the patchwork of villages and place names that quilt this solitary isle of ours.

Apples: unassuming, reserved, often overlooked – are frequently whittled to the widely available and, dare I say it, bland and ubiquitous few – often non-native varieties (Granny Smith is Australian/New Zealand, Golden Delicious, French).

Yet no other country has, or has had, such a wide spectrum of apple varieties as we do in Britain. We homogenise and streamline at our collective peril given that apples have played a central role in our cultural and horticultural – and culinary – heritage since Roman times. Indeed, much is concealed behind that blush, encapsulating as they do local and regional distinctiveness and traditions, not to mention a mouthwatering medley of tasty and characterful varieties.

Happily, we have Apple Day: an annual celebration of all things apple, first launched at Covent Garden in 1990 by the environmental and arts charity Common Ground. Sue Clifford and Angela King, its founders, have been campaigning for the need to preserve and celebrate the importance of British orchards and apple varieties since the late 80s, against a backdrop of a massive loss of orchards since the 1950s.

In 1992, they began promoting the idea of community orchards as a way of counteracting this sliding decline. Since then, more than 350 have been established helping to stem the disappearance of vulnerable local varieties as well as serving as an amenity for the local community – a place to learn and exchange new horticultural skills, share in the apple harvest and ultimately, to establish a growing legacy for future generations to enjoy too.

The inspired people over at the London Orchard Project are working their fresh-faced, apple-cheeked magic across London.  You can learn more about the work that they do and get involved here.

Some equally great news to report to my fellow Hackney residents, is that the wonderful team at Growing Communities will be bringing Apple Day to us on Saturday 16 October this year, as part of the weekly Stoke Newington Farmers’ Market from 10am-2.30pm at William Patten Primary School. You’d be a Major Peasgood Nonsuch of a Foxwhelp to miss it.