Rupert Griffin is fast approaching his busiest time of year when I meet him at the farm just outside Oxford, where he runs his apple pressing operation, Tiddly Pommes. Looking out over a flourishing market garden overflowing with beans, artichokes and courgettes mixed in with marigolds and sunflowers, it’s a bucolic scene. He is surrounded by crates of apples of all shapes and sizes, the colours ranging from bright pillar box red, to a beautiful speckled vivid green, all ready and waiting to be fed to the tall shiny machine that will turn them into bottled nectar. I was delivering three large barrels of Blenheim Orange apples we had picked from the trees on our allotment. We’ve been doing this for a few years now. Just as we finish the last drop of juice from the year before, this is generally a reminder that autumn is fast approaching and the apples are falling. And while some will be preserved for cakes and crumbles, for baking, stewing and freezing, the majority will go to Rupert to be squeezed, pasteurised and conserved as the best tiddly juice in the land.
It is a drink that comes with a difference, for Tiddly Pommes is Rupert’s foray into activism, a kind of green protest. “In the early noughties things had got to the point where the big corporates were offering us so much choice, you could go out there and buy anything from all over the world, but you couldn’t get potatoes from a farm down the road” says Rupert making space amongst three boxes labeled as Dwarf Greensleeves, a bright green homely looking apple picked from a garden in St Bernards road, not far from where I live. “A group of people in East Oxford felt we needed to be re localising basic food production because that’s the most sensible, sustainable, ecologically responsible thing to be doing.” The first East Oxford Farmer’s Market arrived in August 2006 and Rupert was part of it all. He’d been working at three jobs – as a counter tenor on the professional circuit (he has a music degree from New College Oxford and still sings in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin), a restorer of old railway carriages on the South Coast (engineering is a passion) and as a science teacher to the choristers at Westminster Abbey (he also has a Natural Sciences degree). The long hours of commuting for little return had made him unwell, and he felt at a crossroads in his life. The local sustainable seasonal message that his neighbours preached hit the mark.
So when the market found they were short of certain food production, one of them being juicing he stepped up. “I had a large basket press I’d inherited from a friend as I’d been home brewing for years. And when I turned up one weekend to do a demo, it quite quickly became apparent there was a huge amount of fruit out there that somebody should be doing something with. People were coming up to me saying ‘oh yes, I’ve got an apple tree in my garden that nobody does anything with’. The fruit was just being left to rot. ” And so Tiddly Pommes was born. First as a community service where he collected the apples himself from people in his area who had planted or inherited trees whose crops didn’t get harvested otherwise, and now as a small business that sees 25 tons of apples delivered to him here at the farm.
While we think of the apple as being a quintessentially English fruit, its genetic origin is actually from the Tian Shan fruit forests of Kazakhstan, (the until recently capital city of Alma Ata translates as ‘full of apples’). They would have been transported here many thousands of years ago on the backs of herbivorous bears and the like. Oxford was at one time full of orchards. The abbeys and religious institutions that sprung up around the place in the Middle Ages planted fruit trees as part of their need and inclination to grow their own food. Some remain as part of colleges like those at Worcester, once the Benedictine foundation, Gloucester Hall. Ralph Austen, a self taught nurseryman, had an orchard in Bonn Square in the heart of the city during the 1650’s, that supplied the fruit for Oxford’s first cider factory. He wrote a couple of books on the subject, believing that if everyone planted an apple tree in their garden it would not only alleviate poverty but it would also improve the soul. Who can argue with that?
But like so many places, Bonn Square has now been covered in concrete. Indeed since 1900 more than 80% of traditional orchards in England and Wales have been lost to redevelopment and industrial farming. All that hints of what went before, is a name. Appleton (from Appleturn the orchards once grown here for Abingdon Abbey), Paradise Street (the garden orchards of the Greyfriars), Orchard Meadow School, Orchard Close.
So the Ruperts of this world must be celebrated and encouraged. “There are 2,500 different varieties of apples, of which I am lucky enough to work with about 100,” he tells me cutting open the delicious pinky flesh of a Laxton’s Fortune. “I had no idea when I first started. My all time favourite is probably the Adam’s Pearmain. They look like Edison’s light bulbs and they go all gold and orange and red and blobby when they are ripe. A tree of that in full crop is the most glorious sight.”
It’s apparently the day that he presses the Adam’s Pearmain that is the peak of the season, which lasts from the middle of August through to late October. He grades and labels the juice according to sweetness, with 5 being the sweetest. “The Blenheim Orange, our greatest local celebrity is a 5, honeyed and sweet and just amazing. Bramleys, the great English cooker, is sharp and a 1, such a resilient and versatile crop. But many of the best apples, I think are the 4’s. They are not just sweet, they’ve got something else going on. Adam’s is a 4 – it is slightly lemony and nutty. Ashmead’s Kernel is a 4 too. I’d like to get hold of more 4’s.”
The farmer whose barn Rupert uses has slowly been converting the land back to a mixed organic farm, with longhorn cattle in place of an arable crop and in a great moment of cyclicity for Rupert, pigs that feed off the spent crush from his apples. A couple of years ago he asked Rupert to plant an orchard where a Victorian fruit garden once stood. “There’s a jumble of varieties from the Tiddly map in there, fruit that I have pressed and got to know,” says Rupert enthusiastically. “Like a lot of fruit, the apple is a genetic cross. If you plant a pip of your favourite apple, the tree that grows up will not bear the same thing. It might bare something that will be informed by that pip, but half of the genetic information is in the pollen the bee brings. Which even if you had any control over that it could still go a million ways. It’s the luck of the draw. So I’ve learned grafting and general fruit tree husbandry. Every winter I buy up a load of root stocks and I’ll go round take cuttings of special trees. It keeps them going.”
So who knows? Maybe Rupert will produce his very own Tiddly Pommes variety, a mix of Peggy’s Pride, Oxford Beauty, Eynsham Dumpling and names raised in Oxfordshire. “This time of year as we get to the end of the growing season it’s so beautiful,” muses Rupert. “It’s rather like the moment at the end of a great piece of music. As you experience a piece of music being delivered you are constantly re-evaulating everything you’ve heard up until that moment. So every bit that unfolds re-informs your view of what you’ve heard before it. Until you get to the end, the last chord. There’s that silence and you can suddenly appreciate the whole thing. We are getting to that point with the natural season – we’ve all been working and nature has been doing its thing. The leaves and fruits have come and this wealth of natural material has been shown to us. And just now is the moment to appreciate it all. “
And so as the apples are calling, Rupert heads back to the press and I take my empty containers back to the allotment shed. And as I open the garden gate, I am hit by a heady scent. It’s coming from the quince tree, now laden with fruit and ready to pick. For there’s crumble to be made, and the old quince paste moulds need to be filled with membrillo for Christmas. I can’t wait
