Northwood cider apples in the evening sun. A West Country cider apple from Crediton area, Devon 18th C
Soft sweet and fruity cider. #cider#orchards#apples
This is us next week. At Beau Vista orchards the early apples (Tom Putt) and Dyer’s Perry pears are ready for harvesting and fermenting into TeePee Cider. Early this year due to ideal grow conditions from Spring onwards . Woodcut by Chris Wormell #orchards#perry#cider#apples#pears#wairarapa#aotearoaNZ
After several years of wondering what to do with the mature olive trees on our property, we found a local farm (Gold Ridge Farm) that presses olives by reservation. 130 pounds of olives made three gallons of flavorful, spicy oil. It took us a few hours to pick and sort, and we’re already looking forward to next year.
This is a communal orchard around here - the yellow ribbon means that picking fruit is free. Besides apple trees I found pear, cherry, plum, mirabelle and chestnut trees. The location of the trees was published on https://mundraub.org - that's how we found them. #gardening#orchards#sharing#germany
Capitalism, as a system, doesn't do well in anticipating problems or at preparing for crises. That's not how it works.
The only goal of capitalism is creating profits for capitalists, thereby increasing their capital. Short-term, immediate gains. That's all that matters.
So, when the things you expect to find at the store suddenly begin disappearing off the shelves, and no one has an answer for when they'll be back, now you'll know why.
30 years ago the demand for #cider was in steep decline here in the UK. The big commercial cider makers paid farmers to grub out their #orchards and turn them over to other forms of agriculture.
Now "cider" is booming as a cheap drink. The "apple juice" feedstock is imported from China and gods only know what the apples are like and what is done to the juice/cider. Cider makers in the UK are paying farmers to plant orchards again.
Some of the orchards that were grubbed out were hundreds of years old as were the trees growing in them. They contained rare varieties of #apples found nowhere else in the world that gave the cider real flavour and were naturally disease resistant. Old orchards were havens for #wildlife of all kinds. New orchards tend to be deserts of grass with a limited number of varieties of apple trees plonked in them and sprayed with #biocides multiple times per year.
One of the best cider makers in England, Julian Temperly, of Burrow Hill Cider, coincidently just down the road from where I grew up and lived most of my life, was trying to get an EU law passed to say that if you wanted to call your product cider it had to be 99.5% apple juice. Sadly Brexit put an end to it.
When I was a child I played in all the old orchards on the hillsides around here. I would stand up on my horse's back to reach the best apples up high.. and share them with her. Sadly now, they are almost all cut down to make way for development.