Fall at the community orchard in View Royal is a hectic time of final harvests and digging into winter preparation.
“It’s busy but it’s also really lovely and beautiful,” said orchard coordinator River Stevens, noting the changing leaves and final fruits. “There’s definitely a lot of work that needs to be done. We have a lot of volunteers that are coming out to help us with that.”
This year, fall work involves actual shovelling as staff and volunteers whittle away at the hillside digging a 200-metre trench.
A handful of dig-a-thons, manned by volunteers, are set to get the ditch laid ahead of the rest of the project to disperse water from a “mystery drain” at the side of the hill. Less of a mystery now, the home perimeter drain floods the bottom of the property each fall through winter.
“That of course leads to the water settling there, and then we have roots saturated with water. That leads to tree health issues, root rot, all sorts of bad things,” Stevens said. “We’re doing a project this year to solve some of these issues.”
The park is named for Rex Welland, a late resident who left the two-thirds-of-an-acre land to View Royal in trust – under a covenant that it remains an orchard. The non-profit Victoria LifeCycles Project has led upkeep and creation at the orchard since 2013.
The public orchard allows the greater community to see what varieties thrive in a changing environment and get their hands in the dirt.
Fall included a project to do just that: building a trio of new raised beds to create more accessible gardening opportunities for the public, funded through a New Horizons for Seniors grant.
After sussing public input, the plan is to grow vegetables there, a regular crop that keeps folks coming out daily.
Planning for spring planting, the bed bottoms are slowly filled with organic debris. Handily, sometimes the truckloads of wood chips that come each fall for laying around the orchard have a wayward chunk of log lingering in the load. Those help fill out the bases of the beds at the bottom of the orchard nearest the Galloping Goose Regional Trail.
The hustle and bustle of Fall, sometimes amid rain and wind, also includes several late harvests. Picking started in July and peaked in September, but some fruits ripen through the end of November.
“Then we get to move into what I think of as the really fun fruit season; some of our more interesting fruits ripen really late,” Stevens said.
Boasting more than 100 varieties of apples, the orchard has a couple of types that await late fall for ripening. The medlars are impatient for the first frost and hearty kiwis, with persimmon, just ripened, with pawpaws harvested just ahead of those.
“We’ve also had a fun bonus this year; some of our figs have actually started to ripen their second crop,” Stevens said. The orchard boasts three varieties with some edging on ripening what's called a main crop – a second crop of the year on the new growth – which is no easy feat in the South Island climate, noted Stevens.
The orchard uses a coloured flagging tape system to let the community know what is ready to harvest. Guidelines are posted on the shed, where volunteer opportunities are also listed.
Fall preparation includes readying the volunteers for winter pruning – something Stevens hopes they’ll have help with this winter. That apprenticeship starts with a workshop on Jan. 12 from 9 a.m. to noon at the Stancil Lane site in View Royal.
The Welland Orchard Winter Pruning Apprenticeship is a free skill-building and volunteer opportunity that allows participants to develop a solid theoretical understanding of fruit tree pruning, as well as the chance to bring that knowledge into practise while helping with winter pruning at Welland Orchard. The program consists of one training session followed by a minimum of three volunteer sessions.
Find the registration form online at https://shorturl.at/QUPJa and learn more about the orchard at lifecyclesproject.ca.
