giving food away

[den_the_cat]

well if you want me to post some Susan....

the farm shop idea is great, I'm not sure if they will but I could certainly try. Oh the irony if I get my own apples back in the veggie box!

[Millymollymandy]

You CAN control the yield on an apple tree by a mixture of judicious pruning and rubbing off apples at the fruitlet stage. In fact for quite mature trees, it's a good idea or they settle down into cropping very heavily one year and quite poorly the next. Controlling the amount of fruit gives you bigger apples, less drop, and greater resistance to scab and so forth.

Fine if you have one or two dinky little trees, not when you have a whole orchard full! Who has the time? I'll get the ladder out and go round all the trees pruning once a year but rubbing the fruit off, no way!

[hedgewizard]

I wasn't talking about you... Den has one tree. You'll obviously have to invest in a moderately sized cider press and put money down on a liver transplant to mature in ten years.