Mistletoe gathering day – details to follow
GOT in the news #2: BBC Countryfile
Gloucestershire orchards featured in the Christmas broadcast of BBC Countryfile, on 18th December.
Countryfile’s Adam Henson, a Gloucestershire farmer himself, joined GOT’s Jonathan Briggs and Tim Andrews in tackling excess mistletoe in an orchard at Moreton Valence. Jonathan talked to Adam about mistletoe issues and Tim brought along the kit to do the work and talked Adam through the process. And passed round some of his cider afterwards.
The whole piece lasted for about 6 minutes – which is not bad of this sort of programme!
You can view the whole programme (the orchard section starts at about 13 minutes in) at https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001gcmv/countryfile-rockingham-castle
There are some screenshots below:
Blossom time for pears, not yet for apples…
Most of Gloucestershire’s traditional orchards are a mix of apples, pears and some plums – and this becomes particularly obvious, some distance away, at flowering time with the pears flowering first.
We can’t get out much at the moment because of the coronavirus restrictions but here are a few pictures (slideshow below) of the orchard at Standish Court, just south of Gloucester, taken yesterday and showing how the pear blossom picks out the pears from the apples.
In this particular orchard the contrast is heightened by the abundance of mistletoe – which grows readily on apple trees but rarely on pears. So the apples are covered in mistletoe, the pears are covered in blossom.
Note too that there have been some recent losses – trees blown over – and that this may well be due, at least in part, to too much mistletoe.
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