Learning path

Orchards and fruit

You can follow cider fruit from rootstock and pollination to a ripe harvest, and explain why orchards are planted and lost as they are.

Who this is for

You want to understand where cider fruit comes from: the tree, the orchard and the year.

14 pages, each assuming only the ones before it. Every step is an ordinary page on the site; at the foot of each one is the way to the next.

The steps

What a cider orchard is · Orchards
How it differs from an orchard grown for dessert fruit.
Standard orchards · Orchards
Tall trees on grass: the traditional system.
Bush orchards · Orchards
The modern system, and what it trades for yield.
Rootstocks · Orchards
The part of the tree that decides its size and life.
Pollination · Orchards
Why one variety alone will not crop.
The orchard year · Orchards
Dormancy to harvest, month by month.
Biennial bearing · Orchards
Why so many cider trees crop heavily one year and barely the next.
Ripening · Orchards
What happens inside the fruit in its last weeks.
Judging ripeness · Orchards
The tests, and what each one tells a maker.
Classifying the fruit · Explainer
Sweet, sharp, bittersweet, bittersharp — measured, not tasted.
Yields · Orchards
What an orchard produces, and why the figures vary so widely.
Orchards as habitat · Orchards
What old orchards hold besides fruit.
Climate change · Orchards
What is already changing in the orchard calendar.
Restoring an orchard · Orchards
Bringing old trees back into production.

Understand cider — You drink cider, or are curious about it, and have never been told what it actually is.
Make your first cider — You have a demijohn or a fermenting bucket, juice or fruit, and no experience — and you want a sound first batch rather than a lucky one.
Become a better cider maker — You have made a few batches and want them to be good on purpose rather than by luck.
Understand perry — You have heard perry is not pear cider and want to know what it is instead.
Cider science — You want the mechanisms: why cider tastes, smells and behaves as it does.
History and culture — You want the story: where cider came from, who drank it, and the customs that still survive.