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.