We’re happy to announce that the New Mills Community Orchard has received a Green Pennant Award® as one of the best green spaces in the UK managed by a voluntary community group.

Eligible green spaces are judged based on how well they fit the following criteria:

• A welcoming place
• Healthy, safe and secure
• Clean and well maintained
• Sustainability
• Biodiversity and heritage
• Community involvement
• Management/Achievements

Read more about the New Mills award here, where you can also vote for Best Green Flag Award® Site.
Congratulations, everyone!

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It’s been a cold winter at the orchard. We’re all enjoying the milder spring weather though, and soon the orchard will burst back into life.

There have been a couple of changes to the website, firstly, there is a new section called “In the Orchard” which as well as the Orchard guide, which lists our trees, now includes the comprehensive Orchard Management Plan, provided by the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust. It’s a very comprehensive document, based on two very thorough site visits from the Trust - it makes fascinating reading, and will be a useful reference for the coming years.

Also, we would like to encourage you to get involved on this page, by recording any wildlife sightings in the comments at the bottom of the page. If anyone sends pictures, we will try and make a photo gallery on this page too.

And don’t forget to keep looking at our Gallery, especially Pat Stanway’s photograph albums, which are frequently updated.

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The group officially adopted its constitution on 4 February 2010. A copy is available here.

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At long last…you can now download the full guide (PDF) to the trees at the orchard!

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Thanks to the Derbyshire Wildlife trust, we now have the New Mills Community Orchard Management Plan 2010 – 2015 (large PDF)for maintaining the diversity of the wildlife in the orchard, while hoping to keep the orchard as productive and pleasant for visitors as possible. It contains a wealth of information regarding the biodiversity of the site, and gives practical pointers for the future.

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When I was first researching how we might install signage at the orchard, I looked at the various commercially available options. They were all fairly bland and uninteresting, unless you wanted to pay a fortune for something bespoke. I thought a better approach would be to try something more rustic. At the time we had Geoff from GD Garden Services helping us with our garden, a major part of which was manhandling oak sleepers to form raised beds and seating. This made me think it would be quite impressive to use sleepers to mount the signage - but they had two major drawbacks:

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We have put some horses on the lower part of the orchard site to help with the management of some of the dense undergrowth, to facilitate later planting in that area.

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Back in July, local botanist John Hawksford kindly agreed to perform a botanical survey on the orchard site. Here is his report: Botanical Survey (900kb PDF file)

In summary, it seems that the planting so far hasn’t damaged the flora, and there are some interesting rare examples among the 63 different species on the site.

Following are some examples to look out for:

Many thanks to John for his time on this - I’m sure it will be a valuable educational resource for us in the future.

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