EKFS Orchard Competition

Three judges took two very long days to determine the best of the 76 entries for the East Kent Fruit Society’s (EKFS) orchard competition.

Kent was impressively represented, one such representative was Simon Mount of New Barn Farm, Stourmouth, East Kent, who won awards for the best new entrant, the best young orchard and the best orchard with more than 1,000 trees per acre. In addition, his Conference headed the pear class.

The judges considered that Simon Mount’s Rubens orchard, which won second prize in the “any other dessert apple” class, was of a very high standard and, according to Guest, “fantastic for the evenness of the trees and the right spacing for the soil type”.

The judges were retired growers Jack Martin and Philip Charlton and former grower and Worldwide Fruit technical director (procurement) John Guest. Their steward was the Farm Advisory Services Team’s (FAST) James Shillitoe
Thy were also very impressed by Bruce-Lockhart’s Bramley’s Seedling, which won the hotly-contested culinary class and was entered by farm manager John Harper. “It was very, very good because it was a big, mature orchard with very uniform trees whose management was superb,” Guest explains.

He says all of the entries for the pear class were pretty good. Mount’s winning orchard was of the traditional bush type that had been well pruned and was cropping exceptionally well for its type. It proved that an orchard did not have to be “super modern” to win.

extract taken from Brian Lovelidge
Horticulture Week
27 August 2010

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