That’s what we got this year in answer to our springtime ponderings:
April warm, Mai kühl, Juni nass, füllt dem Bauer Scheuer und Fass
April warm, May cool, June wet, fills the farmer’s barn and barrel.
https://anediblelandscape.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/blossoms-bees-barns-barrels/
April was warm and frost free, May was not particularly cool and June was certainly not wet, neither was July, or August, or September… it was just hot, very hot, and very dry, for very long…
Yet the fruit harvest in Franconia’s orchards is a recordbreaker this year (and about three weeks ahead of “normal” ripening times).
But what does that actually mean in these times of far removed mass plastic food production? Who can picture what a “record harvest” might look like?
Let’s have a go.
Here in Bavaria’s main plum growing area it means : 400 tonnes more plums than usual.
Here in our district the fruit presses have stopped taking apple deliveries because they are overloaded…
Narrowing it down to facts and figures based on our 2 hectare traditional (i.e. non-plantation) orchard:
8kg redcurrants, 10 kg sour cherries, 10kg nectarines, 11kg mirabelle plums, 26kg blackberries, 57 kg cherry plums, 70 kg grapes, 85 kg Switzen plums…
All of which is in fact the upper end of normal,
and then we get to the apples:
3200 kg to date with about another 1000 kg still to come off the trees. The previous record over a period of six years was 1500 kg.
Still to come are the pears and the quinces, both looking like weighing in at the upper end of normal too.
So its the apples that have done it: more or less three times their previous record harvest!
We invested in our own stand alone fruit press this year – and not a minute too soon!
Hand-picked, processed and pasteurised by ourselves:
that takes us right back to the origins of where food – and drink – come from!
An Edible Landscape 