Alderbrook Field Notes

Slow observations from a small orchard in the Ardennes.

The orchard

Forty-three trees, of which we have confidently identified twenty-six. The rest are either local varieties with no surviving name or common ones grown strange with age.

What is here

• Eleven cider apples, mostly bittersweets, planted in what looks like a single campaign around the 1930s.
• Nine dessert and cooking apples in the row nearest the house.
• Six pears, three of them enormous and effectively unharvestable without a ladder we do not own.
• Four quinces along the brook, which is where the early ripening happened.
• Assorted plums and one walnut that predates everything.

Work in progress

Restorative pruning, a third of the trees a year, on a rotation that will take until roughly 2031 to come round properly. We are resisting the urge to do more at once.