Bramley harvest underway

We’ve been picking Bramley on and off for a couple of weeks now, mainly for the wholesale markets and catering trade, but today Mid Kent Growers swung into action across the county, picking for long-term storage. Here are our Latvian students Jelina and Arturs hard at work at Pivington. As you can see, the picking team wear buckets into which they place the fruit as they take it off the tree.  The buckets have a fabric lining which is folded shut at the bottom. This is undone when the bucket’s full, allowing the apples to be placed gently into the bulk bin without risk of them getting bruised or damaged.

The white hoop on Jelina’s bucket is a gauge to ensure the right size fruit gets picked, and the small stuff stays on the tree to grow a bit bigger.

This fruit will be placed in controlled atmosphere refrigeration until such time as the supermarkets ask for it. This fantastic system is what enables us to supply top quality fresh apples and pears throughout the year, as it effectively puts the fruit into hibernation. Some varieties store better than others, but Bramley is the daddy, and can happily store for a full 12 months if needed, and emerges from storage as good as when it went in!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 11th, 2013 at 1:15 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.