Otley Chevin Orchard Project

How do you like these apples?! It’s juicing season and we apple-bobbed along to the Otley Chevin Orchard Project on one of their juicing weekends.

Transcript

00:00 My name is Trevor Good and I'm the chairman of the Otley Shevan Orchard Project.

00:05 It started off in 1995 following the death of our child Jonathan

00:11 and we raised something in the region of £1,500 to plant trees on the Shevan

00:18 and that was the start of the orchard.

00:21 It wasn't however until about 2016 that we developed the project

00:28 into a community orchard and to allow people to use equipment,

00:33 to use their own apples to come up here, juice it and then take away pasteurised apple juice.

00:40 We've got a very large macerator to pulp the apples

00:44 and then we've got two pressers to get the juice

00:49 and then we pasteurise it in the education block into the bottles

00:56 which will last for two years or so.

00:58 We sell the juice and then we plough the money back into the project.

01:05 This is the third year that we've actually been juicing

01:08 and not produced as many apples as we normally have

01:12 but it's been surprising the fact that we've actually still managed to get 28 bottles out of it all.

01:17 You chopped up the apples then you put them in a press,

01:21 you press them into a bucket, then you bottle them up then put it into the pasteuriser.

01:29 We have a couple of small apple trees in our garden which gives us a few bottles,

01:34 I don't know, about 15 or 20 or so last year.

01:38 But Patsy, my friend Patsy, has what her old Irish friend Kitsy calls 'country eyes'

01:45 and driving around we often spot apples

01:48 and on the way into Bradford we see an apple tree in the car park of the Nowab restaurant

01:54 which over a few years ago was just left to fall so we thought 'I know'.

02:00 Once we got involved with this chevin orchard we went and asked the owner

02:05 and he said 'yeah, help yourself, take them'.

02:07 So it's a new variety called 'Roadkill'.

02:11 Harry was absolutely excellent, he took to it like a duck to water

02:15 and I just hope he comes back next year.

02:17 Most of the children that come absolutely love it

02:20 and it's great for them to actually see how a food product is produced from start to finish.

02:26 Down at the bottom there is a trailer full of used apple pulp

02:31 that we have a local pig farmer who brings it up,

02:35 he'll come up at four o'clock and collect it and he'll have happy pigs.

02:38 Last year we did about seven tonnes of apples,

02:41 this year it's not such a good harvest but nonetheless it'll be about two tonnes.

02:46 I think we've all learnt basically how to use all the equipment

02:50 so it's nothing like as chaotic as it was when we first started

02:54 and everybody seems to know what they're doing and they just get on with it.

02:58 So it's really good and we've turned into quite a bunch of friends really.