Discover the apple amnesty

Community gardener Konni Deppe tells the story of Luton’s fruit trees and orchards, and an inspired idea to use up surplus apples.

The problem

Do you know of an apple tree near you where the fruit doesn’t get picked? You’re not alone. 

Surprisingly, many fruit trees in Luton’s back gardens and public places go unharvested. Fruit will still provide food for birds and insects, but some of it ends up in people’s brown or even black bins, and make its way into landfill or incineration, adding to our CO2 emissions.

At the same time, many people have lost a connection to our rich orchard heritage. Over centuries, more than 2,000 varieties of apples have been bred in England alone. However, modern varieties are grown for appearance, and ease of picking, storing and shipping, rather than flavour. Today’s supermarkets only offer a tiny selection of apples, often imported. The last greengrocer in Luton who sold local varieties, Round Green Fruiterers, closed more than 6 years ago. 

Trees can produce a ‘glut’ of fruit over a few weeks and then nothing for the rest of the year. Today’s households are often not geared up to preserve or store them, nor do people have the time, so it’s easy to see why going to the supermarket can seem like a convenient alternative. 

The idea

One of the easiest ways to deal with the excess fruit is to turn it into juice or cider. 

Inspired by a similar project in nearby Hitchin’s Triangle Garden, I wondered whether I could collect this fruit and turn it into apple juice instead. So the Luton Apple Amnesty was born. 

Apple amnesties are an idea that’s been around for a while. Many towns and villages across the UK and Europe are making their own apple juice from local crops. 

Apple Amnesty – how it worked

To test the process from tree to bottle, the Edible High Town team and I produced a very small batch of juice last year. We offered a tasting event at St Matthew’s Primary School. People absolutely loved the juice, and it was sold out by Christmas.

This year, to be able to scale up, we joined forces with the social gardening project Penrose Roots and applied for a grant from Love Luton to help us pre-finance the juice. 

We had two drop-off locations where people could leave their harvest on specific days in October. For people who had a lot of fruit but couldn’t harvest or drop it off themselves, we did ‘home visits’ and picked them straight from their trees. 

We found that some fruit trees were surprisingly bare this year, which may have been due to the late frosts in spring. This shows that the more varieties of fruit trees we have, with early and late-blossoming types, the more resilient we’ll be, no matter the weather. 

We supplemented garden apples with harvests from local community orchards, and fruit from places such as Grasmere Nursery School (yes, this school has its own orchard!), Luton Hoo Walled Garden, and the Stockingstone Road Allotment orchard. 

Volunteers checked the donated apples for quality and to ensure a good mix of ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’. Together with Penrose Roots we organised the transport to Apple Cottage Cider press in Radwell, who professionally pressed, pasteurised and bottled our local crop. 

In total we had 18 donations racking up 250 kg of apples, resulting in 227 bottles of delicious juice. The finished drink stores for 18 months, extending the time people can enjoy local produce. 

In the process we discovered several heritage varieties growing people’s back gardens from Laxton’s Superb and Worcester Pearmain to more obscure cultivars that we’re still in the process of identifying. 

Local designer Jenna created a label which includes the names of the apple varieties in the juice. Look closely at the bottle, and you can even see the Luton skyline in the background! 

Each donor who contributed more than 10 kg of fruit will receive a free bottle, and we’ll give some away to our helpers and donate some to good causes. 

The remaining bottles will be sold to help fund orchard activities in Luton such as pruning courses this winter. The  juice is available at a suggested donation of £4 per bottle, for example at the High Town Christmas Market on 1 December. 

More than juice

The Luton Apple Amnesty is one piece of a wider project with the aim of turning Luton’s fruit trees and community orchards into productive, wildlife-friendly places that are loved by the community. 

In the long term, a great achievement would be that no fruit goes to waste in Luton, that community orchards and garden trees are well cared-for, and that no fruit tree is felled where it could have been restored with careful pruning.

We share our work with regional and national organisations, to show off the best of Luton and its orchards. We are already connected to the Bedfordshire and Luton Orchards Group (BLOG), the East of England Apples and Orchards Project (EEAOP), and the Orchards East Forum (University of East Anglia). 

You can support the work by buying local apple juice, donating fruit from your tree, or volunteering with many fruit-tree activities. For more information and contact, visit: www.lutonorchards.org.