If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest… have a really dry year apparently… certainly some things on the smallholding have enjoyed it more than others… and not necessarily the things you might expect.
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As the September harvest with its late summer sunshine gave away to increasingly damp and cool autumnal weather, we gathered in the last of the crops at The Secret Acre and started clearing down the veg beds.
Here are a few pictures from October and early November’s gradual decent into autumn.
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When we were urban foragers living in the city, cherry trees were a favourite, especially the irony of collecting a free basket from the productive cherry trees at the end of a large supermarket car park while those inside paid for theirs.
So it was exciting to inherit an old orchard when we moved to The Secret Acre. And although mainly apples and plums, there was also an elderly cherry. Continue reading
It seemed a slightly odd harvest this year.
Thanks to the unusually hot and dry summer, some old reliables failed, like our potatoes, while some pervious underperformers flourished, like our aubergines. Continue reading
A decade and more ago, the Government were paying grants to grub up and destroy orchards. Today there are loads of Government grants and projects to protect, save and replant orchards, which apparently had been disappearing at an alarming rate. It’s what politicians like to call joined up thinking.
So, blessed with a small old orchard at the Secret Acre, prolific in apples and plums, we decided to do the responsible thing and joined the Gloucestershire Orchard Trust, to add our heritage varieties to the County’s register. Continue reading
The Secret Acre 