We walked into the orchard and pessimistically surveyed the endless piles of dead brambles.  The plan for today was to move all the piles to the end where it could all rot and leave us space to get on with planting.  But the task before us seemed daunting, Olympian, even.  Various methods were used to tackle the enormous heaps of lethally barbed brambles: some went for the rural pitchfork approach, bearing a bundle of brambles aloft, some piled them onto dumpy bags and dragged them, others cut up the brambles and put them into the dumpy bags, while the most ambitious heaped the brambles onto a large tarpaulin, enlisted the help of three others and carried it down to the pile at the end.   The level of teamwork was impressive and by the end of the day, we had cleared all but the couple of piles at the gate end of the orchard.  The difference was amazing.  The sense of community was further enhanced by the lunch we all had together, centred around the table and chairs kindly brought for us by Marion.  And we liked the fact that although he was not fit, Rod came anyway and gave us lots of moral support from the comfort of his chair.  Just because you can’t work like a slave doesn’t mean you can’t be part of our community! The highlight of the lunch break was Malcolm’s joke – ‘What did the chicken say when it saw the duck about to cross the road? “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, mate.  I did once, and have never heard the end of it.”!’  Altogether (despite the joke), it was a very satisfactory day.  We had more people than ever who came to help, the weather was fabulous, and we ended up with a lovely clear area ready for planting and a beautiful wildlife habitat (not a giant heap of rubbish) at the end of our orchard.  We now wonder what there is left to do (apart, obviously, from planting trees…).  Jenny heartened us by recounting what fellow community orchard people had said during the visit to Tatnum Patch in Poole.  They started their area nine years ago, but say that they are still battling against a relentless tide of brambles.  So, still plenty to do for at least the next nine years, everyone… 

Digging up trees – 3rd April

During the workday, we heard that there was an opportunity to get hold of some apple trees for the orchard.  Dan, an old transition friend, has recently moved from his smallholding in Sydling St. Nicholas at extremely short notice.  He had 140 five year old organically certified trees and needed to sell them quickly. He was offering them at a really good price….£5 a tree, but they needed to be dug up and transferred to their new homes as quickly as possible because this is not really the time of year to move trees.  The site was due to be ploughed in a week’s time, so there was some urgency to get the trees out. 

Initially we didn’t think that we could plant into the orchard because we had not worked out any kind of water collection device, and young trees need lots of water, so we began to plant them down at the farm.  However, we made such good progress clearing the orchard yesterday, and the big yawning space we created seemed to cry out for trees.  We visited a neighbour of the site who very kindly agreed to let us use their outside tap to fill the water butts we had on site.  So the decision was made by those at the workday to go up to Sydling and get some trees for the orchard.   Nine of us went up and spent an afternoon digging out trees, red and black currant bushes and rhubarb, and brought them back in our cars.  We immediately planted them onto the orchard.  There are nine different varieties, all local or traditional species.  And now suddenly, from being a scrappy bit of land covered in piles of rubbish as it was yesterday morning, our orchard looks like an orchard!

Jenny managed to get her hands on a smart orange shredder, which was wheeled with huge amounts of huffing and puffing into the orchard, and set to work.  We had quite a crowd this time, including four girls from the IB course at Thomas Hardye’s. Ian began feeding branches and brambles into the shredder, setting a sterling example for all of us, although his cardigan will never be the same again.  Jenny and Kate followed, and found that it wasn’t  as easy as it looked – the voracious orange mouth of the shredder devoured long straight sticks, sucking them down to its whirling blade at the bottom, but brambles were a different matter.  They hooked themselves onto sleeves and threatened to drag less weighty people down towards the blade in an very alarming way.  Then the brambles all got jammed at the bottom anyway and wouldn’t be shredded at all.  Since many of the mountains of waste material consisted of brambles, this looked serious.  Len then took over the shredder, we abandoned the brambles and things went a lot faster.  (Jenny and Kate put this down to the lack of brambles, rather than Len’s superiority as a shredder operator…)  We all kept the shredder well supplied with branches, sneaking in the odd bramble every now and then, but it became clear that a weekend’s shredding was not going to achieve our dream of shifting all the piles of rubbish.  And then the shredder packed up anyway, so we called it a day.  The problem then arose – what should we do with the shredder?  It was too heavy to take anywhere, and we were afraid it would be stolen if we left it in the orchard.  In the end, we had the cunning idea of camouflaging it (what, a big bright orange shredder??)  It was done extremely effectively – one advantage of having so many piles of stuff left over, I guess… – and you would never have known it was there.  As we walked away, some of us wondered what we had spent all day doing…

The following day, since we had hired the shredder for the whole weekend, we assembled again, with some new, fresh (to shredding) faces.  The sun was shining and it was clear it was going to be a good day.  And so it turned out to be.  We uncovered the shredder and apart from a little hiccup when Murray decided to test his strength on the string pull of the engine, everything went smoothly.  Everyone worked hard bringing branches, several hearty blokes operated the shredder and we got through huge amounts of stuff.  The difference was quite amazing this time and we really felt we had achieved something by the end.  The mulch produced by the shredder is all spread out now and is busily smothering baby brambles.  We even had tea this time, sitting round our smart new table, during which we had a serious discussion about the bramble issue.  There were those who momentarily considered tipping over the camping stove in their direction – they were so dry by now that the conflagration would have been brief and immensely satisfying.  But we had assured Network Rail that we wouldn’t burn a single stick, so in the end we reluctantly abandoned that tack.  Jenny said that she would contact Network Rail again to put our case for burning, but later, after several of us had seen a wren, we thought that piles of brambles would make a suitably cat-proof habitat for nesting birds, and since we weren’t going to be using the whole of the orchard area immediately, why not just pile it in one corner and let it rot.  Task for next workday….

Next workday:  2nd April

Having got rid of most of the rubbish during the previous workday, we went back to the brambles and various other tasks.  An old gentleman living in one of the Monmouth Rd houses backing onto the orchard had contacted Jenny and offered to donate £20 towards buying fruit trees.  He also mentioned that he was having trouble keeping his back hedge trim, so two of us tackled that, resulting in some rather impressive hedge laying.  Others worked on the bushes outside the fence and cleared up the path, while the rest of us carried on with the endless 20ft brambles.  Further down the plot, those who favour the slash and burn approach (without the burning, obviously…) were busy annihilating everything in their path.  Luckily, a more sensitive soul spotted a couple of currant bushes which were then lovingly unswathed of their cloak of brambles, then our soft fruit experts proceeded to hack them to bits anyway (it’s called pruning – Ed).  We left the site feeling heartened that yet again, despite the daunting scale of the work to be done, we had manage to achieve real results.  All we need now is a shredder