As a company that rely primarily on picking fruit ourselves from abandoned orchards gardens and hedgerows especially for apple and plum which are the corner stones of most of our preserves we are completely relent on nature, weather partners a wet or dry spring and summer and the temperature if there is a late frost the impacts are endless and the natural fluctuation of the harvest from season to season, one year may be better than the other and sometimes there are a lot of contributing factors that make a season good or bad. There are also the individual contributions from tree or plant, soil type, pruning, age pollination that make a difference.
But this year it was very simple- lots of fruit struggled plums, pears, apples, damsons and blackberries because we had an intense summer of drought.
Every September it's time for us to ring round our locals and ask how the apple trees are getting on in their gardens- most trees produce so much if you've got one in your garden you're happy to share. Picking across so many different gardens also means we pick in more micro climates and soil types making us more resilient to a bad crop.
The Cheshire Damson was a tough one this year- we waited all of August for them to rippen only for the heavy rains of Bank Holiday weekend to cause half the crop to split. Meaning we spent the first week of September rushing round to collect as many as we could, while leaving the split fruit for the birds.
Pears also had a bad year, meaning we've produced a limited amount of our Heritage Pear Chutney and Pickled Pears- it's hopefully enough to see us through the year and next summer well just have to hope that it rains!
Last year was bumper crops all round and everywhere we went the van seemed to fill! This year's been different, with a summer of drought we've had to work harder to get the produce we need this means travelling further to find the fruit we need and changing how much we can produce of certain products.
Luckily we were able to over produce last year due to the incredible crop. This has reduced the effects of this year's harvest and means we have plenty of stock to see us through to the 2027 summer when we will see if it decides to rain or not.
Working this way we are actually more resilient to the extreme weather patterns and instead of sitting on a laptop complaining about the price of wholesale produce going up we just make a few more phone calls and reach out to a few more gardens.