Apple Juice! Orchard, Wedn 8 Aug, 07

An open day at our West Bowling Community Orchard saw plenty of activity. A group of teenagers from the YMCA (BEES is part of YMCA Bradford) got stuck into re-woodchipping the path and a few participated in craft activities. We made bottle cap shakers and decorated them. We also helped a couple of the teenagers to produce drinks-can alcohol-stoves which was a big achievement. Once the stoves were finished they boiled a kettle over one and enjoyed a well earned cup of coffee. Lunch was a BBQ with BEES' charcoal that we made last Summer. The veggie burgers and sausages were cause for much protestation until the teenagers actually tasted them and they seemed to be converted!

The most exciting thing about the day was the inaugral outing of BEES' new apple press. It crushes apples then squeezes them so that most of the juice flows into a container. It's a fantastic olde-worldey machine and I'm sure it will have a nickname soon enough. This was a practice run for our bigger apple day event on Sat 13th October. Our apples will be ripe by then so this time round we bought in some boxes of English apples and made litres and litres of sweet and refreshing apple juice. It was very popular with our visitors from the West Bowling Youth Initiative. Come along to Apple Day in October and you'll be able to pick your own apple juice!

Urban Nature Reserve

Last Friday we cleared the already trodden paths of weeds and laid down woodchip. This was on a nature reserve that we manage, tucked away at the back of the Laisteridge Lane University of Bradford Campus.

The most exciting thing for me was when I hit stone under the soil with my fork along a few metres of the path. It was buried under a thick mulch of woodland matter but I scraped it back and voila!: there was one ready made section paved with stone! I have yet to find the extent of it but it seems quite wide. It could even turn out to be a sort of patio rather than just a narrow path. More digging next time!

The site has been through different uses. Long ago it was farmed and before we started managing it as a nature reserve it had been run as a garden. This has sparked my interest in it's history and I will try and find out more.

The Robins on the site are always completely unflustered by our presence. One landed at my feet as I was talking. It paused a while and then hopped into the undergrowth. We also saw a red damselfly and an azure blue damselfly. We can identify these after we invited an expert down to our open day last week. Children who turned up from the local community had a great time. One family was literally the nearest flat which was part of the university halls of residence. They particularly seemed to enjoy the pond dipping and they also made bird feeders and lacewing hotels. They didn't want to touch the huge and rather alien looking dragonfly nymphs though!