The Colwall Orchard Group brings together people from across the village and beyond to promote, celebrate and restore traditional orchards. We have a wonderfully diverse set of orchards in Colwall ranging from traditional farmstead and garden orchards to the last remnant orchards of the former commercial fruit enterprise in the village. These orchards include apples, pears, cherries and damsons with a particularly good range of varieties of dessert and cooking apples and dessert, cooking and perry pears. We also have lots of fruit trees in and around the village gardens.
CountryFile comes to Colwall... April 2011
This rich orchard heritage is very special and Colwall Orchard Group has been helping orchard owners to restore the orchards, whilst working to raise their profile with orchard conservationists and in the local community.
Our initial survey in 2007, as part of a national project co-ordinated by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, showed that many of the orchards were neglected. The old trees were splitting and falling over, often over-laden with mistletoe and being damaged by sheep stripping off their bark. So, we purchased pruning kit, trained the volunteers in restorative pruning and now run regular volunteer work parties to manage the orchards. Funding from the Malvern Hills AONB and National Trust has also enabled us to plant new young trees into many of these orchards.
Colwall Orchard Group has been sharing our enthusiasm for orchards with as many people as possible. We’ve run children’s orchard art projects and many public events including the Blossom picnic, poetry workshops, Dawn Chorus rambles, fungus forays, bug hunts and moth nights. We have started up our own village mistletoe fair and a Colwall Wassail. We have also raised the profile of our orchards in local, regional and national newspapers and journals.
In the meantime, we have continued find out more about our orchards. We have recorded some fascinating oral histories from some older villagers. We have investigated the bugs and beasties that live on and in the deadwood –finding a range of national rarities including beetles, birds and moths. Our orchards are turning out to be fantastic for wildlife, which reinforces the need to conserve the orchards for their wildlife, as well as their social and cultural value.
..and finally – the volunteers have been hankering after their own fruit to make juice, cider and other orchard produce. Over the last 2 years we have been trying to establish a community orchard for Colwall. We have teamed up with Colwall Allotment Association to buy land for Colwall Village Garden – a community orchard with allotments. We carried out a community consultation in 2009 to gather ideas for our developing plans. Since then we have identified a suitable field, raised the funds to buy the land and applied to a range of grant giving bodies to fund our plans.
 | If you would like to join the group and help with our activities – see the members’ pages for details of forthcoming volunteers’ events and reports of our recent achievements. |
 | If you would like to join us on our public events in the orchards, see our Public events pages. |
| | To learn more about the importance of Colwall orchards – visit our Wildlife pages |
| | Read our previous annual reports |
| | To find out more about our plans for the community orchard – see the pages Colwall Village Garden |