Autumn is peak production time at Gellirhyd Farm, a square stone house with its back turned to the Sugar Loaf mountain in Powys and its front windows looking out over a deep valley, and on to the Black Mountains, their tops just veiled in low cloud. Colin and Daphne Gardiner are picking apples most days, hauling, crushing, pressing, filtering and bottling. The cool room is filling up nicely with green bottles, their labels denoting the apple that produced the juice: Newton Wonder, Grenadier, Crimson Bramley . . .
There are 150 varieties on the farm, many of them old and rare, all of them now rejuvenated, grafted, propagated by the Gardiners and saved for posterity. Preserving old varieties is more important than you may think. About 25 years ago there were more than 70 varieties of British apples available on the high street; now it’s more like 20. In the same time, supermarkets have increased their market share of apples from 30 to 85 per cent. Adrian Barlow, the chief executive of the English Apples & Pears trade association, says: “English apples such as Cox and Egremont Russet are not as long-lasting or as stable as some foreign apples, so many supermarkets import from abroad — for example, Pink Ladies from South Africa or Braeburns from New Zealand — because they store well and are consistent throughout the year.” This has cut the amount of British varieties available.
The Gardiners are part of an increasing number of growers who are reversing that trend. They bottle more than 30 types of “single-variety” juices and the rest go into blends including the winningly named Orchard Gleanings. This week they have bottled the first batch of the sophisticated, dry, Lane’s Prince Albert and will sell it at Usk farmers’ market on Saturday. “We’ve got a sort of beaujolais nouveau situation with the Prince Albert,” says Colin Gardiner. “People have been asking about it for weeks, putting in their orders.”
The Gardiners’ Welsh Farmhouse Organic Apple Juice is a thriving business, yet when they bought Gellirhyd, they had no idea of the value lying in the old, neglected orchards. “We just knew that we had to have the place,” says Daphne. “We didn’t know what we would do with it.” That was in 1991; for the previous ten years they had been running their own small electrical-repair business.
Gellirhyd was a semi-derelict stone cottage on 90 acres (36 hectares) of hill pasture and woodland reached via a long, narrow lane running along the side of a valley between high hedges, remote and breathtaking. It had been lived in for years by one old man who had more or less hibernated there; blackout blinds still hung at the upstairs windows. The Gardiners sold their home and business and snapped it up.
They didn’t know it then but they had acquired a rarity: modern farming methods had passed Gellirhyd by, it was unimproved land that had never seen a bag of fertiliser or pesticide. Because of this there were meadows thick with flowers, butterflies, fungi, orchids, bats and ancient trees. Experts came from far and wide. “We had every sort of ologist crawling all over it, recording species,” Colin recalls. There were rare birds such as pied flycatchers, otters in the river and black poplars in the woods.
Once they’d sorted out the house, Daphne started doing B&B — “We had to get some income from somewhere,” she says — and Colin bought some Black Welsh cattle and a few sheep. Both were a failure. “I couldn’t possibly fatten the cattle in the 30 months allowed since BSE and when I took the first lot of lambs to Hereford market, the farmers laughed at me. They were tiny compared with the big commercial breeds and didn’t get a single bid.”
But the real breakthrough came when the Gardiners took a trailerload of apples to Bulmers in Hereford to be made into cider. “They gave us £50 for the lot,” says Colin. “It cost us more to get it there.” Yet something had to be done with the apple crop so they booked themselves on a cider-making course and spent £15,000 converting an old silage barn into a bottling plant. “But with cider you just throw all the apples in together and we thought, with all these different sorts of apples, maybe we’d be better making a single-variety juice.”
Another expert was called in. “He identified most of them as old and rare varieties, and said that because so many orchards had been grubbed up in recent years, most of the juice we made would be unique.” It was a eureka moment. Since then the Gardiners have become apple connoisseurs, planting another 500 trees, visiting old orchards, taking cuttings from varieties they don’t have themselves and planting them at home. They sell the juice through local shops, delicatessens and pubs as well as direct to the public. They’re not sold through supermarkets yet, but it may only be a matter of time.
The big chains have begun to realise the importance of the British apple and are starting to do their bit. As consumers’ interest in food miles and local produce grows, supermarkets have begun to reassess the potential of locally- grown apples.
This change of emphasis has been rewarded with an increase in sales. The quality has improved, too. “Supermarkets have realised that because they demanded that farmers pick the apples before they were ready (when they were harder and more transportable) they were less tasty and less popular,” says Adrian Barlow. “Now Tesco monitor the quality of their apples to prevent immature ones getting through and Sainsbury’s sales have increased because of their policy of stocking high-quality English apples”.
There are other reasons to buy British apples. Our climate, with its high rainfall, is perfect for growing them; they grow slowly which gives them time to develop their flavour. Apples grown in sunnier climes grow more quickly — so they provide the volume desired by supermarkets — but they don’t have time to develop as much flavour. And British apples in the shops now were freshly picked in the past few weeks. On Gellirhyd, the vintage runs from August to November, starting with Beauty of Bath and finishing with May Queen. With one part-time helper, the Gardiners produce up to 17,000 bottles each year; the juice is pasteurised to prevent fermentation and it keeps well so that there is stock to sell all year round. The spent apple pulp (pomace) goes into compost and to feed neighbouring pigs — payment is in bacon and pork. “Working together in the orchards and at the press, we are always mulling over ideas,” says Daphne, “We ’re never afraid to try something new.”
They got organic certification from the Soil Association four years ago. “We didn’t actually need to do anything to convert,” she says. “The product and our methods were already compliant.” Last year their Newton Wonder apple juice won the prize for the association’s best non-alcoholic drink.
