Conservation, history, green living and local self-sufficiency are the priorities for these volunteers.

All | Charlotte | Jessica | Laura

Thursday Nov 19, 2009

Pioneering and squishing apples

Groups of rosy-faced people tramping round up to their calves in apples in a giant wooden vat. A pastoral scene from the middle ages? No, my fantasy image of our local train station come Autumn next year.

OK, you can't press apples by foot, maybe I was thinking of grapes. Either way, I'm excited as we've just been given the go-ahead to use a large section of unused land down the side of my old train station to grow apple trees.

After weeks of arranging and rearranging, with everyone being too busy I finally met with Sarah, the station delivery manager for North London Lines. She's not only agreed to turn over a patch of land to us for the project, her company will pay for the trees! We're awaiting risk assessments and are making estimates on how much they will cost, and if all goes well we should be digging the place up by the end of December!

It turns out we're pioneers. Although the company has wanted to get involved in community projects for months we are their first success story. Already Sarah's telling us about other stations with even more space which need a similar group with some ideas. It's really exciting that other people may be encouraged to follow in our footsteps.

Anyway, having handed over the original greenhouses project to a more experienced group member it's nice to be barking up a different fruit tree, and having some success. After all these months of community involvement my life just wouldn't be the same without it.

I've mentioned the idea of planting fruit trees at rail stations as a good way of exposing people to theidea of producing their own food. I really want to keep nurturing this idea, to show people where our food comes from and that the environment we live in should be one that is healthy enough for us to grow the food we eat.

I can't wait to get down there with spades and gloves and actually plant some trees! Now we just have to think of what we can do with the apples once they're harvested. Obviously we want them to go back to the community, so apple pressing is a distinct possibility, then we would give out the juice to the neighbourhood.

I expect people are more likely to turn up with empty bottles than bare feet and rosy cheeks, though.

Posted by Laura ( 3:34 PM )
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