October 2023 – Rumwoldstow

Protecting the harvest

The heritage apple trees are still not producing much fruit and I’ve scoffed what there was. But the old Bramley in our garden has given us many fine apples. Last year, we stored a good number but the rats, not surprisingly, made a bee-line for them (surely you can’t have too many animals in a metaphor) and deprived us of several trays of good apples.

Al, being the hero that he is, has reinforced the apple store, which lives in one of the guard-rooms in the gatehouse, with wire mesh. This is of course not historically authentic! Vermin-proof food storage will have been a perennial problem, with grain stores raised on ‘mushrooms’, sealed pits and other strategies used with presumably varying degrees of success.

I almost filled the store with the best apples, as they should keep for longest. We still have a good number in the kitchen that need to be used up asap. Stewed apple for breakfast, crumble for supper…it’s a rough life.

The lone Hambledon

The orchard continues to be a mystery to me…the apple and pear trees planted in 2018 are still not producing significant fruit. This year the pears flowered profusely, there were no late frosts, but nevertheless, the fruit that set all fell and we have no pears. The Wyken Pippin has a few apples, and the Hambledon Deux Ans produced one solitary apple – but it was large, much larger than its few fruit last year.

Reluctant to pick it before it ripened, I left it on the tree; the Hambledon is supposed to be a great keeper. But the other day, it had vanished off the bough, and I found it on the ground – fortunately intact. I therefore cut it up and ate it. Some of the flesh was already discolouring, so it clearly wasn’t a great apple and wouldn’t have kept any longer. But the flesh that was ok tasted nice; it’s been described as a cooking apple, and I found it a bit sweeter than a Bramley but quite tart.

What’s up with the trees? I don’t know. The mature eating apple tree in the orchard (variety unknown) has some excellent fruit but many small and malformed fruit. Is this a disease? Is it too warm in the winter? It’s not been a drought year, nor has it flooded, so it’s a mystery to me. I keep hoping that *next* year, the new pears and apples will start to produce.

In the meantime, there are many medlars!

At Oxford Castle

Just around the corner from St Frideswide’s monastery in Oxford, a small group of dedicated nuns met in September of 923 to wonder at illuminated manuscripts and marvel at Rumwoldstow’s most precious holy relic, the skull of the infant saint’s own faithful duck companion, Ducky.

Well actually we were part of a display at Oxford Castle, run by the Ulfhrafnar group in the Vikings society.