Yesterday was a beautiful autumn day, and we were enjoying a heat wave most unusual for early October. It was a prefect day to go down to the beautiful county of Kent to Brogdale Farm the home of the National Fruit Collection near Faversham. Brogdale has been the home of the national fruit collection since the early fifties. Its purpose it to serve as a research facility for scientist and farmers alike, and to serve as place where all the thousands of varieties of fruit are preserved. I do mean all fruit: apples, cider apples, pears, perry pears, quinces, plums, cherries the list goes on and that is just the top fruit. There is also a huge collection of soft fruit.
We were given a guided tour around the facility. There are 150 acres of fruit trees to wonder round. If you were to try one different variety of apples along each day it would take you 6 years to try them all! As our group was mostly from Cambridge we hunted down some old Cambridgeshire varieties to sample such as Huntingdon Codlin and Histon Favourite developed of course by John Chivers. We did also get the chance to look round the extensive cider and perry tree collection there and it was good to spot some old favourites.
One apple I was very pleased to come across was Ashmeads Kernel show below. This is a lovely little apple good both as an eating apple and for use in cider. A real find - I might buy a couple for the orchard.
Of course no visit to such a place would be complete without sampling the wares made with all that lovely cider and perry fruit. They had a draft cider and a draft perry on offer both were splendid. I opted to bring back 4 pints of the perry as I have more cider that I could possibly (or wisely!) drink.
So the next Kent destination must be East Malling the place where many famous root stocks were developed.
Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook
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