Green Apple Cider

The view from my kitchen window

www.thelittleorchardcompany.co.uk

I’m drinking tea in my kitchen, watching the snow fall in my garden and pondering some of this week’s goings on.

Tony and I were lucky enough to be invited to a fancy boardroom type meeting that took us back to our IT days for an hour or so. One of the subjects that came up concerned the environmental credentials of cidermakers. I felt as though there wasn’t enough time in the meeting to address the issue fully, so I thought I’d have a quick stab at it here in the old bloggaroo. Before I start, I’d just like to say that the following details apply only to the way in which we work at the The Little Orchard Company and that I totally can’t speak for other orcharders/cidermakers.

The orchard in autumn 2012

Well, first of all, we have an orchard. Environmentally speaking, this is both good and bad. We have essentially changed a sheep pasture into lowland woodland, thus attracting a different set of flora and fauna to our acreage. We do, however, feel a little less environmentally guilty about travelling in fossil-fuel-guzzling vehicles as our trees are busily sequestering carbon as they branch out into the future.

We haven’t had to spray the orchard very much so far, although this might have to change if we have many more wet summers! The fungal diseases that love our trees are discouraged with sodium bicarbonate, very occasionally with topically applied copper sulphate, and with good fallen leaf management. 
We think that our orchard insect life is equilibrating too; for example, there were a couple of years when I stubbornly refused to spray insects (insects are bird food and I love birds – OK, OK, I’m a namby pamby IT townie that hasn’t quite gotten to grips with the harsh cruelty of country life – I’m sticking my tongue out at all of you as I write) and, therefore, had to walk around 500 baby trees squishing aphids… lovely! Then, the ladybirds found us. Hoorah for lady birds. We now have loads of them and very few aphid problems. 

Loads of lovely ladybirds

The key here is that because our orchard produces apples for cider and juice, we don’t worry at all about fruit size, colour or imperfections and we don’t, therefore, need to dowse the trees every few days with pesticides.

Apples that think they're lemons

Apples that are a funny shape

So what about the actual cider making then? Well, we all do a lot of moaning about supermarkets don’t we? The prices are too high, the quality is rubbish etc. etc. To the cidermaker, however, the supermarket is king! Not only do they sell our produce, but they also cast out so many apples that we get to pick them up and make cider out of them. 

And apples with a dual core!
;-)  a little joke there for the IT people

Here’s how it happens; the apples that make it onto the shelves at your local supermarket have been chosen for their looks and their size and shape (how shallow!). The fruit that doesn’t make it is perfectly decent, but  a little too big, too small, too pock-marked by that hail storm that hit just prior to picking and so on. This not-quite-glamorous-enough fruit makes its way to the cider makers and juicers of the UK, where it is milled and pressed to make drinks. So, hats off to the supermarkets for being so picky about their fruit. Rumour has it that almost half of the apples grown in the UK go to make cider and juice.

Me with Bertha and her piglets

When all of the juice has been extracted from the apples, we are left with dry apple pomace. Our cidery is on a farm, so the farmer collects the pomace regularly and uses it to feed his pigs and cattle. No waste there then.

All of which gave me a warm glow of possibly-a-tad-arrogant self-satisfaction… until I just looked out of my kitchen window again and noticed that I have melt-water rather than snow for a good metre or so around the house. Obviously I need to wind my neck in a little, turn the heating down and apply some of my environmental work ethics to the way in which I run my household! The dish washer and the washing machine also seem to be running. Ho hum… there’s always something more that you can do to reduce your carbon footprint!