How to Prune a Heritage Orchard

We learned how to prune the Honeydale Heritage Orchard last week.

Last year Andy Howard from the Heritage Fruit Tree Company near Banbury hand-grafted dozens of regional species so that we had 250 trees to plant, including 144 apples, 35 cherries, plus apricot, damson, gage, mulberry, nectarine, peach, pear, plum, quince and nectarine, and he was happy to come back to Honeydale to teach us how to prune them.


He began by telling us how a tree grows. This is vertically, via a leading tip, which releases growth hormone saying ‘reach for the sky,’ as Andy puts it. Fruit however, grows on the horizontal, so there are two types of bud on a tree. A growth bud is thinner and pointier, tends to be found on wood that’s a year old, and has faster vertical sap. A fruit bud is fatter, plumper and rounder and is found on 2 year old wood and produces slower sapped horizontal wood. Growth buds grow in a corkscrew position whereas fruit buds grow on small side branches or spurs.


Our trees are still in the formative stage, so require formative pruning, which involves making the shape of the tree that it will become when you start off with a maiden (a straight upward growth tree that's 1 year old that has been grafted and then had a full growing season.) From a maiden, via pruning, you can make a bush, ½ standard or standard, or cordons, espaliers, pyramids or ballerinas. It’s all in the pruning. The leader needs to be pruned 2 foot from the ground in the first winter, 4ft in the second for a ½ standard and 6 foot in the second winter for a standard.


With five of us working flat out we had most of the apples checked and pruned by lunchtime. We will revisit the other species in May.

Not So Busy Bees

We’ve provided all the hives with sugar fondant to be on the safe side, but the bees performed well in the summer, building up their honey stores which are still plentiful and might have been sufficient to see the bees through until they can replenish their food supplies in spring.

The behaviour of bees in winter is slow and sluggish. They keep a tidy house inside the hive, clustering together in a ball formation and taking it in turns to move to the warmer centre, much as Antarctic penguins do. They’re also popping outside for short toilet trips and forays for water.

Honeydale’s Fellowship of the Ring

Here’s a tale to warm hearts in these cold wintry days.

If you’ve been following the Honeydale blog you’ll know that Elliot has been feeding the birds at Honeydale as part of the Supplementary Winter Bird Feeding project. This involves broadcasting the seed across the field by hand, and the very first time Elliot did this, on a frosty December day, he threw out more than a handful of seed!

It wasn’t until he returned to the Cotswold Seeds warehouse, where he is Manager, that he realised he was no longer wearing his wedding ring. Elliot hadn’t been wearing any gloves when he spread the seed, and the icy conditions meant that the ring had been looser on his finger than usual, so he thought it likely that the ring had been lost on the farm. Elliot and his wife Harriet had celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary just the day before, so both were upset by the loss of Elliot’s band of gold and several friends and colleagues went back to the plot at Honeydale to have a hunt. The remains of the wild bird seed mix that had been sown in the spring is now all used up and patchy, with bare soil showing between the plants - which is the whole reason for carrying out the supplementary bird feeding in the first place. So hopes were high that the ring would not be too hard to find. But no luck. Until Warehouse Assistant Del came to the rescue! He contacted a friend of his, John Miller, scaffolder by trade, and also founder of the metal-detecting Recovery Service.