Windfalls and fruit on the ground

Cider trees are large, the crop is heavy, and the fruit is worth little per tonne. Picking a standard orchard by ladder into bins would cost several times what the fruit is worth. Shaking the tree — traditionally with a long pole, now with a trunk shaker — and gathering the fall is the only method the economics support, and it has been the method for centuries.

It also fits the ripeness question. Because cider fruit is picked late, many cultivars have reached their optimum by the time they are ready to fall, and a shaken tree gives up exactly the fruit that has reached that stage while leaving the rest. Two or three passes through a block over a fortnight will take each cultivar close to its own optimum.

Some traditions extend this deliberately. In parts of Normandy and in West Country practice, fruit is left in heaps or on the ground for a period after gathering — sweating, or maturing — which softens it, completes starch conversion and raises juice gravity slightly before milling. That is a controlled hold in known conditions, not the same thing as fruit lying forgotten in wet grass.

Three things deteriorate in ground-lying fruit. It bruises on impact, and bruised tissue is both leaky and undefended. It stays wet in a sward that holds dew and rain long after the air has dried. And it lies in permanent contact with soil, which is where the spores are. Together those give mould an entry, a medium and an inoculum.

The organisms that arrive are not random. Penicillium expansum is the classic blue mould of wounded apples and the principal producer of patulin. Monilinia species cause brown rot, spreading from fruit to fruit in contact. Acetic acid bacteria and vinegar flies arrive at any broken, sugary surface and bring both spoilage and a route for further contamination. Fruit that has begun to break down is also warm inside a heap, which accelerates everything.

Grass length is the practical variable nobody thinks about until harvest. Long grass hides fruit, holds moisture against it, and defeats a mechanical gatherer. Mowing short before the fall begins is the single most effective thing a grower does about ground fruit, and it has to be done in advance because it cannot be done once the crop is down.

The practical rules are consistent across traditions: mow before the fall; keep stock off the orchard from the start of the fall; gather in short intervals rather than one long one; keep gathered fruit in shallow, ventilated heaps rather than deep ones that heat; wash to remove soil and grass; sort out anything visibly rotten; and mill promptly rather than storing wet fruit.

Mechanical harvesters make the intervals shorter and the sorting more important, because a machine takes everything: sound fruit, rotten fruit, mud, grass and the occasional stone. Where a hand gatherer discriminates as they go, a harvester defers the whole discrimination to the sorting table, and if there is no sorting table it defers it to the mill.

Fruit that has been on the ground under a hedge since the last storm is not part of the crop. Distinguishing that from fruit shaken down yesterday takes no equipment and no analysis, and it is the difference between a normal cider harvest and a batch with a problem in it.