Brockley Common - A Post Celebration

For anyone that made it down to Brockley Station on Saturday they had a treat as the Brockley Cross Action Group and Transition Brockley alongside many volunteers and some of Brockley's very talented people came together to provide visitors with food, drink, musical entertainment and hopefully a bit of inspiration! The Brockley Cross Action Group have done wonders in transforming the area around the station and it will only get better as time goes on with plans for a performance space and hopefully new station facilities sometime in the future providing a welcome gateway into Brockley for residents and visitors.

It's early days in our quest to harvest Brockley's unwanted fruit and we're quickly finding out about the logistics of such an operation but I'm pleased to report that it's proving to be very rewarding and great fun!

Our first harvest of the day began at a house in Breakspears Road, Brockley where we were confronted by the most wonderful site of huge pear trees, likely to have been a part of Brockley's past heritage and many different varieties of Apple. We were tasked with picking Bramley cooking apples from a very well-trained tree which has obviously had a lot of love and time given to it over the years. The pictures below show the tree and volunteers in action. We tried out our new fruit picker with its handy prongs and basket which allow you to pick the apples easily and collect them in one move without straining too much. In all we picked around 10 boxes of apples of which 4 were to go down to Brockley Common to be given away to passers by.

The Apple Tree

Using the new apple picker

The second harvest at a house in Algiers Road by Katie and Caroline in the afternoon provided eating apples to compliment what we had on offer but we didn't just have apples though as we also gave away the damsons picked earlier in the week alongside fruits picked at the station from our own plot and also the hedgerow nearby.

One of the highlights of the day was one of our visitors who took it upon herself to take some of the apples and bake a pie only to come back within an hour and allow us to sell it to very willing customers! A prime example of how quickly fruit can be transformed from the point of picking to something different but very tasty.

Our stall in front of the garden we created and some keen customers tuck into the apple pie that one very generous and enthusiastic visitor made after taking some apples frm our stall.

At the end of the day we managed to give away all the fruit we picked which was great and make people more aware of the things we do and promote the fruit harvesting and new orchard underway this autumn.

You can view more photos of the day here

Thankyou to all that helped out!

Dam good harvesting!

Tonight saw the first harvesting event of the year as two members of Transition Brockley made their way to a home in nearby Grove Park to pick Damsons which will be given away to visitors to the event at Brockley Common on Saturday.

When the offer of harvesting Damsons was first suggested by a friend we lept at the chance to use it as a bit of a trial run before the major harvests of the autumn. With tarpaulin, boxes and our new handy apple picker we managed to pick around 200 Damsons.

Picking Damsons

Our damson haul and a couple of apples