Apple Daze

Today is Apple Day in the UK, or at least the anniversary of the first apple day held in 1990, and October is these days the time for Apple Festivals all around the country.

We have been to a few events in the past few weeks, the largest and most impressive, of course, being the Apple Festival at the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale (near Faversham) in Kent.

We have enjoyed ourselves, despite the wet and sometimes cold weather, and have seen lots and lots of different apple varieties, tasted several, and bought a few.

We continue to be astonished by the diversity of sizes, shapes, colors, flavours and textures that apples come in, that we had no idea about until a few years ago.

The photos were taken by D, under challenging conditions. It was raining heavily a lot of the time, and by the end of the last day water had got inside the camera. Fortunately he managed to dry the camera out!

The apples in the photo above are Red Elstar. You can find out more about all the different apple varieties on the National Fruit Collection's website.

Another website that has lots of information about heritage apple varieties is Orange Pippin.

Edward VII

Lord Lambourne

Knobby Russet

Starkrimson

Yellow Belleflower

September Beauty

Gelbe Trierer Weinapfel

Francis

Pumpkin Sweet

Wellspur Delicious

Woolbrook Russet

Below are photos of some of the apples on display indoors at Brogdale. This year's displays were arranged in alphabetical order.

Alastair Cannon White

Antonovka Grammovaya

Kaiser Franz Joseph

More indoor displays from another festival.

Beauty of Hants

Catshead

George Cave

Herring's Pippin

Hoary Morning

Powell's Russet

Red Ellison

Sturmer Pippin

Below are three of the varieties that were for sale at one of the festivals.

Kidd's Orange Red

Ribston Pippin

Catherine

The Brogdale festival included pears as well as apples, so we also got a guided tour of the pear orchard.

Plymouth pears are very tiny pears that you wouldn't want to eat, but they are the ancestors of our modern pears, so they are in the collection as a genetic resource.

Plymouth pear

Black Worcester pear

The Black Worcester pear is a cooking pear,  with an interesting history involving Queen Elizabeth I, and it appears on the Worcester coat of arms. You can read more about it here.

I just realised that I never got around to blogging about our previous visits to apple festivals in 2011 and 2012, so I will try to write up some of those  in a later post.

Also tasting notes to come.

September 2013

September 12th:
The perils of food growing: most of the nearly-ripe tomatoes, plus a couple of the still-green ones, have split because of this week's rain. C'est la vie.

September 11th:
Saw what we think is a hornet in our front garden.  Never seen anything like it before. It's quite large, about as wide as a honeybee and maybe three or more times as long, with a bright yellow end, and a burgundy colored thorax. The first time I saw it, about a week ago, it seemed to keep bumping against one of our rosemary plants, which are not in flower at the moment. Scary.

September 6th:
It seems that traditional French milk producers are just as beleaguered as their English counterparts.
Here is a link to a campaign to save traditional milk production, http://sauvonslelait.fr/ and an appeal set to music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guMYOFphto&feature=youtu.be
which I came across via a link from Clotilde's blog, Chocolate and Zucchini.

September 1st:
At last the tomatoes are starting to go yellow.  They are a yellow variety from the Heritage Seed Library, Scotland Yellow.
Hopefully they will ripen before blight sets in, otherwise I have a recipe for Green Tomato Curry from Floyd's India. Last year's attempts to grow tomatoes were a total disaster.

Found some fresh pistachio nuts in the shops. They have a thin leathery outer skin, pink to black in colour. When you peel that off you get the hard shell that we are used to seeing on pistachios. The texture of the fresh pistachio kernels is similar to that of fresh hazelnuts.

Bought some Turkish-style ice cream, dondurma. Ice cream is made in Linton, Cambridgeshire. Contains salep, and doesn't seem to contain cream, so maybe a low-fat type of ice cream. The color was very white, unusual for cow's milk ice cream, and more like some goat's milk ice cream that we had at a Food Festival in Hyde Park in the early '90's.

August 2013

In the photo:
Greens that I have been growing, with seeds from Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library.
Left to right: top row - Asparagus lettuce (celtuce), lettuce var. Liller, lettuce var. Amish Deer Tongue,
lettuce var. Bath Cos,  bottom row - chrysanthemum greens, turnip var. Nabica (grown for the leaves),
callaloo (amaranth) var. Mrs. McGhie.


August 17th:
Bought some Iranian ice cream in a Turkish food shop. Ice cream is made by the Village Bakery in East Finchley. Decorated with pistachios and flavoured with rose water and salep,
tastes like Turkish delight, unusual and very, very nice.

August 10th:
Bought some green olives to cure. Apparently they come from Cyprus. Surprised to see green olives in August, I thought they were supposed to arrive in October, and was surprised last year when I found some in  the shops in September. Attempting to cure them in 20% brine. Hopefully that will stop them growing moulds.

Went to see a play in St. Leonard's Church, Shoreditch. I  think this is the church in the Oranges and Lemons rhyme, as in "When I grow rich say the bells of Shoreditch.''

August 4th:
Tasted white currants possibly for the first time. Taste not as distinctive as that of blackcurrants or redcurrants.

Spring at last

It's been a long hard winter, and it seemed like it was never going to end. The first daffodil in our front garden finally bloomed on March 10th, several weeks later than usual, and it was so cold they kept going until about the 23rd of April, by which time the tulips were nearly ready. The cherry plums that normal bloom in early to mid-February were at least a month later this year.

But over the last 3 weeks or so, the daytime temperatures finally climbed above 10 degrees celsius, and we've also had several sunny days, and nature has fast-forwarded. The lilies of the valley were barely breaking through the ground a few weeks ago, but they've nearly got to full-size, although this year they weren't in bloom on May 1st, the flower buds aren't ready to open yet.

But the red camellia across the street suddenly put on a spectacular display, with all the flowers opening at once. The magnolias flowered, and all of the ornamental cherries. Today I noticed that the cherries with the  large pompon-like pink flowers are in full bloom. Our Morello cherry is also in full bloom.

Our rhubarb, which I usually reckon is big enough to eat around Easter, is nearly there, and I'm planning to cook some of it over the weekend.

And so we have fast-forwarded to the first bank holiday of the summer. It's been obvious that we're marching towards summer since the days are much longer and the sunlight wakes me at 5 am,
but since it's been so cold and gray, and all the spring flowers were behind schedule, it was difficult not to feel that it was still winter.