Old Varieties

Celebrating and remembering old fruit and vegetable varieties

You are here: Home / Archives for Flavours

Flavours

First Heritage Apple Crop

Our three year old heritage apple trees have yielded their first fruits this year and the taste is out of this world!.

September has arrived and with it, the first crop of apples from our recently planted heritage apple orchard and although the yield is

Scotch Bridget

not vast, the taste and quality of the fruit cannot compare to the bland supermarket varieties.

We planted five eating apples and five cooking apples, all of varieties suited to a northern climate and all grafted onto dwarf rootstock, which should give us more manageable plants.

Our apples were supplied by Adam’s Apples in Devon and we sought their advice on the best varieties suited to our region which would tolerate being grown as cordons or small trees.  On tasting, I have to say, the selection is outstanding; the eating apples have such diverse flavours and colours and the cooking apples have wonderful textures and flavours.

The crop this year has not been big enough to store but some of the cooking apples have been prepared for the freezer and should last well into the winter.

We always garden organically, using no pesticides or fungicides and as a result, one or two of the fruits may have the occasional blemish but these are nothing more than slight skin imperfections and in no way detract from the flavour of the fruits.

The trees will be given a good mulch and feed this winter and we look forward to next year’s crop.

More information

Adam’s Apples – Talaton plants in Devon supply a huge range of heritage apple varieties along with very helpful advice and expertise.

Old Varieties v New

Over the last three years we have been growing heritage vegetables as well as more modern varieties and whilst we have not been conducting a scientific experiment, the outcome is interesting.

vegetable harvest
2009 Harvest

We trialled heritage varieties of Tomato (San Marzano Di Lampadina) and French Bean (Blauhilde).

Both varieties were grown under the same conditions as the modern varieties; Tomato (Gardener’s delight) & French bean (Pantheon)

Firstly the French beans – The heritage variety (Blauhilde) really did struggle, with generally weaker plants succumbing very easily to slug damage and mildew.

Out of the total crop sown, around 70% succeeded to seedling stage but only 25% of the plants made it to cropping stage of which crops were generally poor.

Tomato San Marzano Di Lampadina did very well as seedlings (probably due to the lovely warm spring).

They produced quite strong plants with a fair crop of medium sized fruits.  However, the time taken to ripening seemed to exceed the amount of sunlight hours available in the North of England and fruits struggled to ripen.

A batch of Green tomato chutney put them to good use.

We have also grown other old varieties of vegetable including brassicas and shallots and in general, the results have been much the same with plants struggling through the wet summer and producing less yield with a constant fight against disease.

Although heritage varieties are worth growing for their different flavours and textures, we found that we have had to nurse them to production stage with a great deal of loss.

Worth mentioning, is the simple fact that our Cumbrian summers over the last three years have been rubbish, to say the least.  Extremely wet, dark and with very little strong sunlight.

We are interested to hear what other growers of heritage vegetables have experienced around Britain and we certainly still advocate growing the older varieties, although we do suggest researching the varieties well to see if they will be suited to prevailing conditions.