Apple Day 2024

Yesterday, 9th October, saw our community come together to celebrate our first ‘Apple Day’.

Apple Day, is a celebration of all things orchard related, include tasting apple varieties, apple juicing and sharing recipes.

We were joined by Fergus from The Orchard Project, a charity dedicated to creating, maintaining and celebrating community orchards. He brought along his fantastic Velojuicer, which is pedal powered, and everyone had great fun turning apples into fresh apple juice.

There was an apple themed scavenger hunt around our orchard, we tasted a number of different apple varieties, Red Devil was a firm favourite, and we even made bird feeders using apples and bird seed. Fergus’s apple spiralizer was a huge hit and fun way to eat your apples.

We had a lovely day celebrating our orchard as part of our ongoing ‘Heritage Project, Looking to the past - Linking to the future.’ Fergus was able to stay on afterwards to give our own staff a session on maintenance and how best to look after our own orchard. We've planted a variety of heritage apple trees here at Parklea, with hopes that they will provide us with a bountiful harvest in the future.

This has been made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and thanks to National Lottery players.