Warming toes and cockles with Tiddly Pommes
Blimey, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has arrived early this year! Its still August and the apple harvest is well ready. And what a harvest it is. The most abundant apple crop I’ve seen in years, if not ever. Not so surprising remembering the abundant blossom. Some apple varieties don’t hang about either. Its been good eating the James Grieve over the past couple of weeks, but others like Lord Lambourne are coming down the track, and already the James Grieve are beginning to look a little ‘over the hill’; they bruise easily and as soon as they are ripe the birds go for them. So rather than waste them its time to get local apple juice company Tiddly Pommes in to harvest them. I did this first in 2013 when I broke my shoulder in a bike accident and couldn’t harvest them anyway, but I soon realised what delicious juice they make, and it doesn’t go off unlike the apples – at least not for 18 months.
So here we were, Rupert Griffin and Lord Muck on a rather misty morning, stripping the tree of all that fruit. 
Rupert who founded Tiddly Pommes several years ago is not only an apple expert but a great engineer who loves to improvise, and developed a pressing and bottling business in his back garden. Its gone well and is now installed in the abandoned glass houses where Oxford City Council used to raise all the bedding plants for its ‘Britain in Bloom’ Award winning displays (I remember visiting them when I chaired the relevant committee as a councillor back in the 1980’s). Public sector cuts have seen to that – its all contracted out now, but at least the greenhouses have been re-purposed. Today is a good day for harvesting James Grieve because the convent on Fairacres Road has three trees and they can all be pressed in sequence without the need to clean out the machinery. He is off there next. Actually Rupert really likes to keep varieties separate. Customers, whether they be local restaurants, deli’s or farmers market clients, like to buy a pure juice; ‘Apple juice,variety unknown’ doesn’t have much of a market (if that’s your thing try Tesco, who last time I looked, were marketing theirs with the come-on ‘Serve lovely and cool’, not like the horrible and cool stuff all the other supermarkets flog of course).
Last years target was 10,000 bottles. Rupert said rather gleefully as we picked away, ‘We made it just, 10,001.’ So my 30-40 bottle contribution seems like pretty small beer. But neighbours have contributed similar quantities of apples; Henrietta’s Worcester’s and Elizabeth’s Grenadier’s are both from garden trees in Divinity Road. Favourite apple? ‘Adams Permain’ says Rupert without missing a beat.
It shouldn’t take long to see the results; a small number of free bottles, and as many more as I like at ‘trade price’. As for the rest? Rupert has them for sale, so when you are next at a farmers market in Oxford, or eating out, try some. Lord Muck will be entertaining guests with a few bottles in the coming months; the sweet aromas and tangy joys of those James Grieve’s will live on accompanying some of the other produce of this glorious season.
