Apple Day 2016

Well what a great time we had! Juice everywhere, sticky fingers, mucky clothes, mashed apple and wasps! It was good to welcome new faces as well as old. Tea and apple cake and music and apple juice for all, and so many apples. We were going constantly, non-stop from 2pm til well after 5pm and we still had hundreds of apples unpressed at the end. Washing, chopping, milling, pressing. Everyone left with bottles and bottles, weary and happy.

The humble apple, Malus domstica, is traditionally the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, probably through word association in the Latin – malus is also Latin for ‘evil’ (as in ‘malice’) – during the early centuries of Christianity. Renaissance pictures of Christ as a child often depict him holding, or taking, an apple as a symbol of the sin from which he came to cleanse the world.

Bramantino, Madonna and Child, pre 1508

Here, in north Cumbria, it is one of the few trees that is happy to have have a go at putting down its roots into our heavy, wet soil and, providing it isn’t nipped by a May frost, yielding us wonderful, edible fruit – perhaps this is part of its redemption?

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