A Yorchard.
Rounton Coffee roast beans in East Rounton on the West side of North York Moors National Park, which doesn’t have a bar called Noyomo Napa, at least not yet.
Rounton Coffee is generously & sustainably supporting an orchard planting scheme based on local and heritage varieties.
Here are the founders in a photoshoot that I have defaced for laughs:
The orchard’s founding fruiters are reported as three apple varieties and a bullace, all of them adapted to Yorkshire’s extreme environment, being tough, and good for cooking or alcohol.
- ‘Hunt House’ Apple: Small tree that crops well in short northern Summers.
- ‘Yorkshire Greening’ Apple: This reliable old cooker was famous long before Bramley’s.
- ‘Ribston Pippin‘ Apple: The only tree we grow: versatile, good for cider, still a nice eater if you like a sharp flavour.
- Ryedale Bullace: Definitely a cooker, ideal for chutney.
Some of those old varieties also aren’t easy to buy; online nurseries might list them, but they are out of stock all the time.
Many of the small local garden centres and plant nurseries with visitor access that used to hold the line for selling these low demand, local heritage varieties have closed.
And tastes have changed: in the past, cooking apples that stored well in the larder were a consistent part of an ordinary diet for about half the year.
Today, most gardeners want the tastiest eating apples from their tree, ready to eat off the branch, and don’t have a larder or a pantry, never mind a scullion; we use a fridge-freezer for storing apple juice if we feel the need to do so.
Perhaps this orchard project found a local supplier or made a special order with a grower, and maybe they took cuttings and grafted their own using the kind of high quality mail order rootstocks that will be available again next bareroot season.
Full disclosure: We have no business connection to Rounton Coffee. We only drink Yorkshire tea, and would never accept bribes of delicious roasted coffee beans unless they were offered to us.