Volunteers from Hope Baptist Church in Highbridge have been planting apple trees in their community garden to create a mini orchard thanks to a donation from family cider maker Thatchers.
It has been donated the apple trees as part of Thatchers Community Orchard Project, which is helping community groups, schools, and charities across the UK plant more trees this spring as first featured here by Burnham-On-Sea.com earlier this year.
Over the last couple of years, a team of volunteers have rebuilt Hope Garden to create a space for growing vegetables for the Foodbank while offering a quiet space for contemplation and reflection.
The garden is also a place where people can volunteer to grow food and at the same time improve their mental and physical health and wellbeing.
It now contains a combination of shrubs and fruit trees, perennial flowers and vegetables grown from seed including sweetcorn, tomatoes, parsnip, cabbage, sprouts, courgettes, leeks, garlic, onion, carrots, lettuce, strawberries, and raspberries.
The trees that are being planted include a selection of apple varieties, including both eating apples and cider apples. They include the popular eating apple Cox; Bramley a favourite for cooking; and Harry Masters Jersey, a favourite Somerset cider apple.
With 500 trees in total to be given away this year, the producer of much-loved ciders Gold, Haze, and Blood Orange, simply asked organisations to explain why planting trees would be beneficial for their communities.
Jade Zerk, Hope Baptist Church Minister, says: “Thank you, Thatchers, for our new mini orchard, such a wonderful addition to our garden. We look forward to enjoying the beauty of the trees, as well as sharing their harvest with the local community.”
“At Hope we love to offer our resources to those in need and our garden provides fresh fruit and vegetables throughout the year, thanks to the kindness, hard work and generosity of many local people. Our garden also provides a space to for quiet contemplation and reflection.”
Cider maker Martin Thatcher, who planted his first apple tree in Somerset at the age of just five, says: “From a single apple tree to a community orchard, it can make such a difference to people’s well-being which is why we’re delighted to be donating these apple trees through our Community Orchard Project.”
