Apple Day

Apple Day is a festival celebrating the apple and orchards in general. It's a fairly new festival (actually established during the 1990s) but I heartily support it. It was set up to encourage landowners to maintain their orchards and also to encourage the public to eat the produce from them. Apples are wonderful in so many ways.

Up and down the country today, and over this coming weekend, fruit farms and farm shops as well as historic properties and community orchards will be organising apple and cider tastings. Notable events include the Big Apple in Herefordshire (see here) and Bankside October Plenty in London (see here), where you can meet the Corne Queen and Berry Man. But if they’re too far away just look out for adverts locally as there may be one near you.

I've written about apples previously here and here. It's a fantastic fruit. The Crab Apple is Britain’s only indigenous Apple tree but every invading settler brought in their own local varieties with them and there are hundreds of different kinds of apple growing wild or in people's gardens. 

The Celts associated apples with healing, youth and rebirth. They were sometimes buried in churchyards in an effort to feed the dead and in the Welsh Câd Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees), the Apple is described as the noblest tree of them all, the tree that symbolises poetic immortality.  Apple trees are one of the magical trees that form the Ogham tree alphabet. Its Ogham name is Ceirt or Quert (see here). 

In Great Britain it is customary to wassail the oldest apple tree in the orchard on Twelfth Night (either January 6th or old Twelfth Night on January 17th) to ward off evil spirits and beseech the trees to produce a fine harvest of apples the following Autumn. The oldest tree is named Apple Tree Man, and is the guardian of all the trees in the orchard. The last apple is often left on the tree at harvest time to ensure a good harvest the next year. There are many traditions connected with this rite, including shooting through the branches to ward off evil spirits, and pouring apple cider onto the roots. Toast soaked in apple cider is placed in the branches for the Robins, who embody the spirit of the Apple trees. Celebrants drink warm cider and sing traditional Wassail songs. Wassail probably comes from the Anglo Saxon words, wes hal, meaning good health. 

A Wassail procession to the orchards at Cotehele in Cornwall. Photo: Chris Groves.

The Apple is a member of the Rose family, which includes other magical British Ogham trees, such as Rowan, Hawthorn and Blackthorn. So I decided to mark the day - and the Harvest - by making a sorbet using apples from my own 60 year old Bramley tree and the last bottle of Rosehip syrup that I made with last Autumn's crop.

It's sharp, fruity, and delicious and the ingredients (bar the sugar) were all natural and free.

How do you like them apples, eh?