Community Apple Pressing Day… and the official opening of the Orchard House

This Saturday (26th September) from 10.30 till 4 we are hosting our annual community apple pressing day at Swan Barn Farm. If you have a laden apple tree in your garden and were wondering what to do with all that fruit, fear not, we have the perfect answer for you. Bring them to us and we will help you turn them into the best, freshest tasting apple juice you will ever have seen.

Our wonderful historic press and scratter will be used for the day to process the fruit, the press has been working in orchards around Haslemere for over 100 years. Even if you don’t have any of your own apples (or cant find any to scrump!) everyone is welcome, we have the bounty of our orchards to process as well, and everyone is welcome to come and join in. It is always a fantastic family friendly fun day, with plenty to see and do. The Black Down Ranger team will be on hand as well in case you have any appley, orchardy or fruit tree pruning questions. If you have some juice to take home with you we will also be able to teach you how to preserve it, or, should you so wish, turn it into your own home made cider.

We are enormously proud of our two orchards here at the farm, they are a haven for wildlife, and have growing in them a number of wonderful and rare varieties of fruit. Orchards are a living cultural link with the past, a very important, and now sadly increasingly rare and threatened part of our countryside. We are doing our best to look after the orchards in our care, we plant new trees every year, prune and tend to the ones we already have, and invite people to come along and take part in the traditional rituals and harvests that they have to offer.

As part of this many of you will know that we have recently been building a new Orchard House at the farm. It has been constructed from sustainably sourced timber from the woods we manage around Haslemere and put together on site by the Ranger team. It is a new home for our events to be run in, a storage space for our orchard, gardening and beekeeping gear and a place to keep our historic apple pressing machinery.

Last year on Apple Pressing Day we had only just finished putting up the timber frame:

This year I am pleased to say that it is all finished, ready just in time for everyone to come and use it to celebrate the bumper year we have had in our Orchards. Jane Cecil (National Trust General manager, South Downs) and Sarah Bain (President, National Trust Black Down and Hindhead Supporter Group) will be officially opening the building at 2pm. If you can be here to join in the celebrations with us you will be very welcome.

We are really proud of what has been achieved, it has taken a lot of work by a lot of people to build. I hope it is going to be a very useful and productive space. Orchards cannot survive as museum pieces, pickled and preserved, they need people in them making use of their product to make sense of them. Through the use of our new building I hope our apple trees will continue to flourish, grow and bear fruit for many years to come.

Frame Raising

Last Thursday was frame raise day for the orchard house. It is such a privilege to see a timber frame make its way up. They are born from the hard work and craftsmanship of so many people and the product of the management of the woods from where they grew. In this case the woods are on Black Down, and the craftspeople are the Ranger team and many friends of Black Down.

The frames had all been lined up ready the day before.

I didn’t get much sleep that night.

Ever a believer in (or hoper for) kind omens, the day started with the making of a wreath.

Made from the fruits of the hedges at Swan Barn Farm, tied onto a base of apple wood. It was in hope for a good day, and was lifted with the first frame. The frames were lifted into place with a hand winch. As the first one slowly creaked upright I got a good feeling, it felt like it was all going to be ok.

Because we were using hand tools, and because everyone was concentrating on their part in the lift, there was an atmosphere of calm and quiet while the frames went up.

Thanks to everyone who came along to watch, I found it spellbinding, I hope you enjoyed it too.

One by one they were lifted, tucking themselves underneath the ridge pole.

Up until now it had just been a collection of jointed together poles in a field. Now it was something different altogether. It will become our orchard house, a home and store for our apple, orchard, veg garden and beekeeping activities. I guess not everyone will like it, but we are really proud of it, I hope it will help give purpose and breath extra life into our orchards and the things we do with them.

Two of the bays of the building form an open barn, to maximize on space we mixed in a box frame along with the cruck frames. The box means there is space for people, but it still needs to meet the ridge pole. To answer this framing problem we pinched a traditional carpentry technique and made a king post. A king post is a bit of a special thing, requiring it to be made from something special. Ours is made from a piece of windthrown rowan, a species of much significance for a westcountry boy. I hope it brings us luck.

It was a nervy moment lining up its mortices in the ridge and frame. Whilst we were jointing the frames these two timbers had never been within so much as 20 meters of each other. In the event the tenon only needed a slight adjustment to get it  to fit snugly.

As I was slotting it into the ridge I looked into the mortice and wondered. Spike must have had a similar thought. He chucked me a 2014 10p piece to pop in the heart of the joint. Evidence for the future.

The frame is now standing next to the basecamp at Swan Barn Farm, waiting for us to get stuck in to the next phase of the project. So much more still to do, but we have a building now, and that feels like an achievement.

This Saturday is a great opportunity to come along and have a look at what we have been up too. It is our Community Apple Pressing Day.

We will be there from 10-4. Bring along your apples and we will use our historic pressing machinery to turn them into juice that you can take away with you. If you like we will even teach you how to turn it into cider. The Black Down Rangers will be on hand to answer your apple, orchard, fruit tree or pruning questions. Even if you haven’t any apples of your own you can come along and help press ours. Refreshments will be available, and we will offer tours of our two (one finished, one far from!) new buildings. It is going to be fantastic family fun on what we hope will be a lovely autumn day in our orchard.

 

Fledglings… and a fledgling project…

Just in case you were wondering, I thought maybe an update from the squatters in my toolbox might be nice…

A thrush moved in a few weeks ago and built a nest whilst I wasn’t looking. To start with she would fly off whenever I went in the shed, but after a while she just looked at me in a very disgruntled fashion.

I still thought she might be a bit too disturbed to hatch and raise the chicks, but I was really glad to be proved wrong.

To start with I didnt see the chicks much as she was keeping them warm, but as the days went by and they got bigger she was often out feeding, so I got to see them grow.

It didn’t take long for them to fill the nest. They were definitely staring at me as well, wondering what on earth I was doing in their shed.

Then last week it came time for them to fly the nest. I was really lucky and just happened to go into the shed to fetch some sheep feed at the exact time they were fledging. As I walked in I saw the last of them hop out of its nest and perch on the edge of the tool box.

It had a brief look around, and then flew off and perched on an old hay bale in the corner. I left them too it, I am so pleased they made it, and will be listening out for their song in that corner of Swan Barn Farm.

Elsewhere we have been busy sawmilling some oak for our collegues elsewhere on the South Downs. They brought over some timber that had come down in the winter storms, and we cut it for them into posts, parts to make benches and a whole list of other useful planks for them.

Our mill is going to be busy again in the coming weeks as we will be starting to work on preparing timber for a new building at Swan Barn Farm. Last week we had great news as our application for Planning Permission for an Orchard House had been approved by the council. The idea is put put up a structure for our apple press and scratter, to house our community apple pressing days and provide a small apple store, potting shed and workshop space to help us run our orchard, beehives and veg garden. The orchards at Swan Barn are looking wonderful in the spring sunshine, I am so proud of them. They offer a home for many rare varieties of fruit tree and wildlife, offer opportunities for local people to get involved in the countryside and provide sustainance for the table and the soul in the form of apples for cooking, eating, storing, juice making and cider. The Orchard House will give a centre and home to all these activities, as well as an opportunity for our staff and volunteers to hone their green woodworking skills. I am really looking forward to the project… Much more to come on this hopefully over the course of this year.

First job though was to make the pegs. We will be using a green roundwood frame again, and we need to hold this together with seasoned oak pegs. We needed to mill the blanks to make the pegs out of so they could dry properly before being used to hold our timbers together.

Its a small start, just a few sticks really, but they mark the beginning of a project that we hope will sustain and support our orchards. I am really looking forward to seeing it all unfold.

Restoring a cider press (Part 2)

Having only been presented with the screw for the press there was quite a bit of new metalwork that needed to be bought and fitted to get the project off the ground.

Unfortunately when it comes to buying nuts, bolts and tie straps unless you spend a lot of money the only ones it is relatively easy to get are galvanised and distinctly shiney looking, not really what you want for cider press restoration. I managed (again with lots of help from John, thankyou!) to source the bits we needed, but they needed some pretty severe distressing, and I don’t mean by calling them names.

The plan we came up with was a highly scientific programme of hitting hard with a hammer, dragging round behind a landrover on string, chucking in a very hot fire and then leaving in a water trough for 24 hours…

It was a bit of a messy faff cleaning them up after so that the threads all worked nicely, and some might say it wasn’t worth the effort, I guess you just have to judge for yourself from the before and after bolts below. I know which one I reckon looks the part.

All of the parts in the press are really oversize and heavy, lucky for the Slindon team the thing is going to be huge, otherwise after all this work I reckon I’d be sneaking it in my pocket and dragging it back to Black Down!

Next was fitting the boss in the top beam.

The boss holds the screw up in the air, so needs to be really snug in the beam otherwise the whole thing would just drop rather than pressing. Much nifty drilling and chiseling later it was being driven into a beam with a very large hammer. When it was halfway in I must confess to weak thoughts of blimey, if this doesn’t drive all the way home we are never getting it out again. But, with a few more judicious hits success was achieved. Suffice to say the bolts that hold it in place are entirely decorative, that thing is never coming out.

Mortice cutting in the top beam next. I wanted to get a few of the key joints cut to give a plan to work to next week when there are more people helping. That way the maths could be done in advance without too much thinking on my feet. The mortices are the slots cut into the beam that will later recieve and hold the legs in place.

The other job that I knew was going to be really tricky, and therefore wanted to get out of the way was making the plattern (which is what I am reliably informed is the correct name for the plate of a press).

It is made out of a large chunck of oak sawn out of the middle of a tree. It needs holding together with metal tie straps otherwise the force it excerts on the crushed apples to extract the juice would split it apart. Katie and Lauren did a fantastic job of marking out and recessing the straps into the wood.

It was really fiddly and complicated, there are straps underneath as well as on top and they all need to line up perfectly. Daves penchant for working in inches when working in wood probably doesn’t help much either.

Recessing the metal meant lots of marking and measuring, but we were really pleased with the result.

Next comes lots more joint cutting and fitting together… wish us luck!

Some treats from the orchard

It seems like ages ago now, but towards the end of last summer we were busy in the orchard at Swan Barn Farm picking the apples.

Our volunteers worked with us to process them through our scratter and press to extract the apple juice.

We also held a community apple pressing day at which we pressed well over a tonne of apples from around the town. All in all quite a number of people left Swan Barn Farm last year with quite a lot of apple juice. Some of it was no doubt kept in the fridge and consumed over the next few days, but we also provided people with instructions for how to turn the murky looking (but delicious) juice into cider. If you were one of those people, I hope your cider turned out well. Most of ours is still sat in Speckled Wood waiting to be bottled, it fermented quite slowly as it was out in the cold, but I took a couple of demijohns home and fermented them out in the kitchen where it is warmer and the process works faster. I bottled it around christmas time, and figured today might be a good time to try it (In case you are wondering it is after midday and I have the day off!).

It has cleared really well, and because I put a tiny bit of sugar in each bottle is lightly sparkling. Now, I’m not claiming it is going to win any awards, but, it is definitely not completely awfull, which friends will know is where the bar is set for my home brewed efforts, and therefore I have decided to pronounce it a success and entirely drinkable! I hope yours turned out well too. If you missed out last year look out for our apple pressing and cider days later in the year at Swan Barn Farm.

Last year I also tried out something new with the products of the orchard. Towards the back of a cuboard I discovered a 2 litle bottle of undiscovered cider that had been pressed in 2010. Aha I thought, what about making some cider vinegar! In fact I had been saving the dregs of a couple of bottles of unpastuerised cider vinegar for just such an occurance, they had gone slightly cloudy and as such I knew contained the perfect starter culture to make some vinegar of my own. I’m no expert, but the following is my (probably pretty basic) understanding of the process and how to try it our for yourself.

Yeast turns sugar into alchohol, thats how apple juice is fermented into cider. At a certain alchohol strength the yeast dies, this allows the cider to clear and at that point it needs bottling and protecting from the air to prevent bacteria spoiling it. Some of these bacteria can be useful though. Acetobacteria live off alchohol and turn it into acetic acid thereby turning the liquid to vinegar. Fermenting and vinegar making are, as I see it, the processes of allowing these natural organisms to go about their business in a controlled manner. Here’s how I did it.

I took a plastic demijohn and put my cider in it, adding the dregs from the old vinegar bottles. I only put enough in so it could be safely stored on its side.

The lid has a hole in it where you would ordinarily put an airlock. For making vinegar I just put a bit of cotton wool in it. This kept flies and other nasties out while allowing plenty of air in. Keeping it on its side let the air reach the maximum possible surface area of the cider giving the bacteria the best chance of working well. I then stuck it on top of a cuboard and forgot about it for a couple of months.

Over this time the bacteria had done their job. They had turned the cider into vinegar (one smell made that obvious) and in the process had formed (as expected) a bacterial mass, otherwise known as the mother, which was floating in the vinegar. The mother of vinegar has been known about for centuries, the bacteria form a mass in the liquid which looks like a sort of strange jellyfish. The idea is that you save the mother and then use it to start your next batch of vinegar with. I put it into a jam jar to take a photo, not sure when I am going to need more vinegar, and I know I can always start it from the remains of the last batch, but if I need it I know it will last a while at least.

The rest of the vinegar was simply passed through a muslin filter into a couple of bottles I had been saving to store it in.

I am pretty chuffed, it tastes great, and I have already been searching the internet for some culinery ideas to start using it. I am also told that it is prized by many people as a health tonic for poultry. Apparently a small amount added to their drinking water once a month is supposed to be very beneficial for their digestive system, so it looks like my chickens have a treat coming their way.

We will be pruning the orchards soon (ok I know we a re a couple of weeks late, but its been so hectic here) and just the thought of that has started me thinking about spring. The orchard behind the High Street in Haslemere is such a treat at blossom time, if you live locally I couldn’t recomend more highly a walk through it when the blossom starts to come out. The air will be alive with the sound of the bee’s and the scents from the trees. It really is quite a special place, putting something on the dinner table which came from there is always a real treat.