Growing food and the love of traditional orchards

I have a passion for earth-friendly gardening, particularly growing anything edible. I use permaculture and biodynamic principles.  I am a natural scavenger and eat plenty of wild food.  I am interested in the old ways of preserving food. I have been learning traditional techniques at the Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex.

I am particularly interested in renovating old fruit trees.  Many orchards are still being grubbed up because they are overgrown and untended and people think they aren't worth keeping.  Older fruit trees were often of more unusual varieties including culinary varieties - though we are the only country to make a distinction between eaters and cookers. The Victorians distinguished between those for their dining tables and those for the servants.  I'm passionate about tending old apple trees especially those that have been neglected for some time. With their cooperation they can produce better quality fruit and improved health and vigour by pruning.  Contact me if you would like me to look at your trees and give some advice.

I have also been grafting old apple, pear and stone fruit varieties onto root stock by budding (summer) and bench grafting (winter) in order to preserve them.  I have been growing edible wild plums from seed.  I now have some trees to sell.  I have learnt how to grow tree fruit on their roots which has several advantages.  I am happy to give advice on grafting as well.

I have been learning the art of apple identification from Peter Collett and Gerry Edwards of the RHS fruit group and members of EEAOP for the last four years.  This is a life-time's work - there are about 4000 in the UK of which 250 are common.  To that end I am planting a small orchard of my own containing trees I have grafted myself.

I have been developing a series of workshops looking at the interface between inner and outer garden titled 'Gardening the Soul' and how gardening helps us stay well which I will be running seasonally.  They will include the practicalities of growing our own food to feed ourselves.

Nature and gardening can be used metaphorically to describe and facilitate the inner landscape and journey. We can make a strong mind/body/spirit connection with nature, which in and of itself facilitates wellness.

During the workshops we look at how the garden contains many metaphors and helps us to explore our ideas of outer and inner garden. We see how this can help us to maintain our sense of wellbeing. The workshops are designed to be fun and you will, hopefully, take away an experience that will stay with you in the months to come. The workshops are largely experiential using creative visualisation and expression, and bodywork. Sometimes they incorporate experience of specific gardening techniques and care of the environment.

Many of the examples of garden as metaphors occur in poems eg

...Power warps because it involves joy in domination;
also because it means forgetting how we starve,
break like a corn stalk in the wind,
how we die like the spinach of drought,
(Piercy, 1983).

Even Alan Titchmarsh was heard to say on ‘How to be a gardener' (BBC2) “Seeds are packets of dreams. Planting seeds. How boring. Slow down, be mindful, connect with the seeds, the earth and the self. It is soul work.”