CSR - Corporate social Responsibility
It is quite funny for such a small company to talk about corporate social responsibility, for we don't have massive budgets, nor are we so divorced from the people and places where we work that we need to re-establish links. Basically, it's a nice easy catch all for the other stuff that we do, and would like to share with you.
Honest Graft
Some years ago the decision was made to stop waiting for the stars to align and external support to arrive, and to just take a punt.
Rootstocks were ordered, enquiries made to obtain scions and we set up a course to teach others how to graft. Grafting is a means of clonal reproduction whereby we take a cutting (scion) from a variety of known quality and by means of grafting we splice this to a rootstock from which the scion then grows.
Why does this matter? Well ask how yourself how many different apples you've tried, now consider that The National Fruit Collection in Brogdale, Kent, includes over 2,000 varieties of apple. What does a Peasgood Nonsuch or Pitmaston Pineapple taste like, or how about a Honey Pippin, William Crump, or Lemon Queen? Well that's what we wondered and so we set about grafting them so we can find out!
There is also a more serious note to this, which is that since the end of the Second World War we've systematically set about removing many of this country's orchards and the skills that went with them, whilst new commercial orchards concentrate on a very small number of varieties, the economic forces which lead to such outcomes are understandable, the question is what happens if we experience a failure in infrastructure, or one of these handful of varieties is found prone to a particular pest or disease?
With a changing climate we now see high quality wine being produced in southern England, something which was unthinkable just twenty years ago, no-one can know how future change will affect growth, but by having large varied collections of top fruit; not just apples, but pears, plums, gages, cherries, apricots, quince and so on will allow us the opportunity to track and study growth patterns, flowering, fruiting and the prevalence and consequence of pests and diseases.
You can find out more about this project at http://www.honestgraft.org
Rootstocks were ordered, enquiries made to obtain scions and we set up a course to teach others how to graft. Grafting is a means of clonal reproduction whereby we take a cutting (scion) from a variety of known quality and by means of grafting we splice this to a rootstock from which the scion then grows.
Why does this matter? Well ask how yourself how many different apples you've tried, now consider that The National Fruit Collection in Brogdale, Kent, includes over 2,000 varieties of apple. What does a Peasgood Nonsuch or Pitmaston Pineapple taste like, or how about a Honey Pippin, William Crump, or Lemon Queen? Well that's what we wondered and so we set about grafting them so we can find out!
There is also a more serious note to this, which is that since the end of the Second World War we've systematically set about removing many of this country's orchards and the skills that went with them, whilst new commercial orchards concentrate on a very small number of varieties, the economic forces which lead to such outcomes are understandable, the question is what happens if we experience a failure in infrastructure, or one of these handful of varieties is found prone to a particular pest or disease?
With a changing climate we now see high quality wine being produced in southern England, something which was unthinkable just twenty years ago, no-one can know how future change will affect growth, but by having large varied collections of top fruit; not just apples, but pears, plums, gages, cherries, apricots, quince and so on will allow us the opportunity to track and study growth patterns, flowering, fruiting and the prevalence and consequence of pests and diseases.
You can find out more about this project at http://www.honestgraft.org
Waste Management
This is a serious matter for us, typically the waste we generate are largely inert; green waste, stone, concrete and soil, as licensed waste carriers we send these for disposal via appropriate routes locally; soil, stone and concrete are screened and the stone crushed to make roadstone and the soil sold on. Whilst the green waste goes through a slightly more complicated process as shown in this excellent film.
Plastic is an issue however, and as far as possible we reuse rubble and compost sacks, and dumpy bags, but tend to generate a surplus which we'd be happy to pass on. Other plastics are less re-useable; films, wraps and the like and these tend to go straight into general waste streams.
