Autumn is our favourite time of the year at Sandford Orchards. It is busy, with long hours and a lot of hard work, as we harvest and press the year’s crop of apples. Yet it is extremely satisfying to see them starting their journey to becoming fabulous cider. This year, harvest time was even more special because we were visited by a film crew from Yeti Television, working for The One Show, who wanted to capture the cider magic we create in our corner of Devon.
Picking the Right Moment for Picking
Harvest season usually starts in early October and will run right through until the end of November. All our apples come from orchards within a 30 mile radius of the cider works but apple variety (we pick over 80 different types), orchard location and weather patterns mean that some of our apples are ready to harvest before others and the start of the harvest can be hard to predict down to the day. That isn’t usually an issue for us because we are happy to wait for the optimum moment to bring in each bountiful crop. However, this year, we’d been planning the filming for The One Show since the spring.
One of the cameramen had already visited a couple of times to capture time lapse images of one particular orchard as it blossomed and then sprouted apples.
Key to the filming was capturing this orchard as the apples were ready to harvest. That took some best guesstimations, some serious weather watching and a few revisions to timings as the filming day drew nearer.
Gathering in a Bountiful Crop
When you think about collecting apples from an orchard, it’s common to picture people reaching up and plucking the fruit from the tree branches, however this isn’t how cider apple harvesting is done. We wait until the fruit has fallen from the trees onto the ground. This is an indication that the tree has given the apple as many nutrients and as much flavour as it possibly can. Only then is it ready for harvesting. We use apples from a range of orchards and we took the film crew to visit two contrasting sites.
At Shobrooke Farm, there is a small unregimented orchard of apple trees that dates back for many generations. It would most likely have been planted to be the farmer’s personal cider source.
It is not somewhere that is set up for machines so we have a team of apple pickers who collect the produce by hand. By contrast, Orchard Farm, as the name suggests, was planted to produce a commercial cider apple crop. The regular lines of trees make for easier mechanised harvesting but it was no less picturesque for the filming and we enjoyed some glorious Devon sunshine as presenter, Chris Bavin, turned his hand to harvesting alongside our chief cidermaker, Barny.
From Fresh Apples to Delicious Cider
Once the apples have been collected, they are loaded into trucks and delivered to huge bays in our forecourt. During harvest, we take delivery of around 3000 tonnes of apples and the film crew was able to witness one of our daily lorry deliveries. They then followed the apples from the bay to the bottle. First they watched them float into the ciderworks along a waterway, created using the rainwater run off from the roof. Then they saw them carried up a stippled belt that sorts the apples from the twigs and leaves and sends the fruit into the mill to be crushed. They then filmed the resulting apple juice bubbling out of the press and ready to be fermented and matured in our huge vats. They also filmed the mountain of apple flesh, skins and pips that is sent to be converted into combustible gas for producing green heat and power, and also carbon dioxide, which we buy back to put the bubbles into our cider. Finally, they filmed our bottling hall where a full bottle comes off the line every second and we can produce forty five kegs an hour.
See it For Yourself
During the busy day of filming, we also welcomed Professor Keith Edwards, who is leading our DNA mapping research to identify lost apple cultivars. He was filmed explaining how we hope our work will help us identify and propagate climate resistant, delicious cider apples. He joined Barny and Chris as they tasted one of the award-winning ciders created from one newly rediscovered apple variety. It was a well-deserved reward for a long day of filming. Devon had put on a spectacular display with wall to wall sunshine after days of heavy rain. The crew left with hours of footage that they were then tasked with condensing into about four and a half minutes, meaning much of it will not make the cut. The resulting feature will be watched by an estimated 4 million viewers on 20th November on BBC 1’s The One Show. If you miss it then you might be able to catch it on iplayer or you can always book yourself onto one of our tours to see and learn more about Sandford Orchards for yourself.
