Little beats the magic of watching apples grow. Every spring, we watch as the pale pink blossoms pirouette away, setting the scene for tiny green nuggets that swell into fist-sized, fully formed fruits. If you walked through our orchard today, you’d see the first signs of this year’s crop lining the trees like baubles, basking and blushing in summer’s last rays. It’s like the entire orchard is holding its breath, waiting for the breaking point when the apples finally thud down.
But this year, it’s different. There are fewer apples decorating our trees, with our award-winning apple farmer, Bob Wady, anticipating that this year’s harvest will be almost a third of what we usually grow. But why is this – and is it something to worry about?
In a word, no. It’s normal for apple crops to bob and dip; if you walk through any wild crab apple orchard in Somerset, you’ll often see the trees overladen with fruit one year and then completely barren the next. Over the centuries of making cider, we have, of course, developed processes to even out this oscillation – like pruning, which helps us yield a more consistent crop. And as we’ve just had three good years in a row, it’s only natural that this year’s bounty is slightly smaller.
However, those three good years have also tired out our trees, leaving them more open to disease and other challenges. Like the extremely wet autumn and winter we’ve just experienced. Of course, it’s part of our British DNA to complain about the weather, but the ground being wet and waterlogged meant there was less air circulation to the roots of our already tired trees – which led to a lot of root decay in the wetter winter months. Thankfully, this can be sorted out with a little bit of pruning and a whole lot of love, and we’ve already nurtured affected trees back to a healthy state.
But on top of all that, as spring rolled around and the trees burst into shimmering pink life, an unwelcome visitor buzzed into the orchard: apple blossom weevils. These pests feed on the swelling spring buds, preventing them from blooming into fruits. Plus, spring’s higher rainfall meant that, yet again, we were thwarted by the weather, so the infestation really took hold and fewer apples made it into fruition.
And it’s this series of unfortunate events that led to this year’s lower yield – but, as Bob assures us, this isn’t always a bad thing. For one, our tired trees were already under a lot of stress, so it’s almost a blessing in disguise that we didn’t have a heavy crop as that would have put the trees under even more pressure. And for another, fewer apples doesn’t mean poorer cider; the apples we do have are in tip-top condition and ready to begin the harvesting process.
Although it’s too early to tell precisely which flavour profiles will characterise this year’s crop, we know from centuries of cider making that off years tend to reap slightly larger apples, which often makes up for the fact that there are fewer of them. And because we make a triple vintage cider, we already have some previous vintages currently being aged – so we can rely on them if 2024’s yield is scarce.
We’ll find out in a couple of weeks, when Bob anticipates being able to shake the first few apples from the trees. And that’s when the true taste test can begin…