Hilly Fields Orchard Planting

 The long-awaited orchard planting finally took place on Saturday with around fifty members of the local community participating. The London Orchard Project with their tree expert, Russell Miller and a couple of assistants from Hackney Harvest brought the trees and equipment and members of Transition Brockley and the Friends of Hilly Fields provided refreshments and support.



Planting in full action



In all seven apple trees were planted, the varieties of which can be found here and they now sit happily on the lower ground alongside the Stone Circle. The next stage of the orchard will be to develop the orchard management plan and set up a meeting to discuss how to go about the watering and maintenance duties. A few people expressed an interest in adopting a tree and any others wishing to do so can email us and we will get back to you with details.

One group with their completed tree

Thanks to those who helped make the day run smoothly:

The London Orchard Project and their helpers; Prendergast Hilly Fields College for lending us some tables to set up the refreshments on; Keith, the park keeper for letting us use his facilities to heat up refreshments and Glendale for providing the mulch; Erin from the Broca for lending us some equipment to heat up the soup and drinks; the refreshment crew who made apple soup, hot spiced apple juice, cakes, dried apple rings and for serving them up to hungry participants!

Finally a big thank you to all who came whether you watched or took part it was fantastic to see so many of the local community coming together to do something positive and hopefully very rewarding.

The refreshments went down very well!



The completed planting

There are lots more photos of the day on our Flickr site. In the meantime we will keep you updated on the progress of the trees on this blog and add more photos as they come.

We briefly discussed an informal wassailing event to celebrate the orchard sometime in February so do look out for details of that in due course.