Happy Apple Day!

National Apple Day, October 21st, was launched in 1990 by Common Ground. Their aspiration was to create a calendar custom, an autumn holiday. From the start, Apple Day was intended to be both a celebration and a demonstration of the variety we are in danger of losing, not simply in apples, but in the richness and diversity of landscape, ecology and culture too. It has also played a part in raising awareness in the provenance and traceability of food.

The concept has become incredibly successful over the 30 years since – with events taking place all over the country organised by local orchard and apple groups, across a range of dates throughout October.

Here in Gloucestershire there are many Apple Day themed events, some in the last few weeks, some in the next few weeks.  Have a look at the events section of our website to find an events near you.

https://www.commonground.org.uk/apple-day/

Jim Chapman has sent another revision of local apple varieties based on the results of the national DNA work.

The main changes for Gloucestershire in this update relate to the varieties Hagloe Crab and Pride of the Orchard which are identical, genetically-speaking, to the varieties Tupstones and Brithmawr (respectively).

For full information have a look at the updated summary document on our website here – but do note that this is not an easy read (and it helps if you have a copy of the original Gloucestershire Apples book!).

This will be the new website for the Gloucestershire Orchard Trust (GOT).  It is under construction at present – our existing website at gloucestershireorchardtrust.org.uk is the place to find information until this site is complete. Feel free to explore the structure, but please note that the content is not yet complete and there are editing notes on most pages. And there are not many pictures yet – but there will be many more soon.

We hope to have the new site up and running fairly well in time for our AGM on 29 April 2017. The aim is to split the current site into several sections, this main site describing GOT and what it does, with news, information on events and how to get involved.  We hope to build much stronger social media links as part of this.

Specialist websites

The sections in our current website on Fruit Varieties, Local Orchards and Orchard Advice will be rebuilt as subsites alongside the main site – these are also being built at present and available via the links below.  Note that these sites will take longer to build, so may not be ready before the end of April:

• Fruit Varieties – new website (under construction)
• Local Orchards – new website (under construction)
• Orchard Advice – new website (under construction)

Navigation

Primary navigation for each website (the main one and the specialist ones) is via the menu below the logo at the top of the page. This will be a bar across the page on a wide screen or a drop-down on a smaller screen or phone. The menu above the logo has short-cut links to the various specialist sites and back to the main site.

The Side-bar

The side-bar will provide short-cuts and feeds to our blog, facebook, twiiter feeds etc – formatting is not yet finalised.

A note on the logo

We are currently reviewing our logo, so the websites you see under construction all use different variants at the moment, just to see how they work.

The OrchardMarketplace website

The future of the Marketplace website, currently managed by GOT at https://orchardmarketplace.org.uk/ in association with the Orchard Network is under review and an announcement will be made soon.

A new post just to test the website structure and to see whether and when that grey pencil images appears by default