Reflecting on the 2025 Shipton Mill apple harvest, by Ruth Quinlan

14th December 2025 

Delicious apples! Eat them neat: crisp, sweet and juicy or cooked: soft with deep, complex, caramel flavours. There are thousands of varieties of apples that exist worldwide. Gloucestershire has created about 80 varieties of apple and we’re growing some of them at Shipton Mill, including Hunt's Duke of Gloucester, Siddington Russet and Ashmead’s Kernel. They’re beautiful!

We’ve got about 40 different apple trees at Tetbury and Frampton, our two different mill sites. Some of the trees are mature. They were already growing when John found the mill near Tetbury in the 1970s. Other trees have been planted as recently as this year. We’ve got espalier trees taking advantage of a south facing wall along the drive, there’s the main orchard where the bees are up on top of the hill, above the compost field.

There are mature trees in our inner garden and along the grassy footpath and a row of young trees at Frampton.

This year was a bumper year! We’ve picked hundreds of kilos of apples and turned them into a few hundred bottles of juice. We’ve got some cider on the go with Tim from Orchard Revival, the windfalls have been turned into chutney, given away to customers and staff and beautiful Mangalitsa pigs in Tetbury. 

Some apples are stored safely in our apple store for the winter months.

All the trees require some care throughout the year. In early winter, once all the apples have been harvested, we make a tree paste which is painted onto the trunks after any moss has been removed. This is a great opportunity to have a close look at the trees and see how healthy they are. The tree paste contains a biodynamic preparation, cow manure, clay, sand and equisetum tea. It’s used to help keep the tree healthy and fight fungus. The biodynamic horn manure preparation is energetically stirred into rainwater (in the clay vessel shown) for one hour. 

There had been a frost after I had prepared the equisetum tea and when I stirred it into my big black bin of all the other ingredients I found a beautiful frost pattern at the bottom of the pan. 

Next up is pruning. It’s a pretty big job. The aim is to shape the crown of the tree into a goblet which you can throw your hat through. That space is necessary to let the sunlight fall on the branches and the ripening fruit. 

Here’s our orchard in winter showing mostly apple trees, but there’s also a cherry, quince, plum, pear and peach. 

We do a lesser amount of pruning in the summer. It’s especially useful then to keep the new leaf growth from shading the developing fruit.

Another important part of tree care is weeding around the base of the tree to stop competition from weeds and after we’ve done this we usually add a nice layer of rotted down leaf litter. This improves the soil and keeps down weed growth by shutting out the light.

The trees bloom in the spring and you’ve just got to hope that there’s not going to be a frost or strong winds which will damage the blossoms or discourage pollinators. We’re in a magical dingly dell of a garden in Tetbury, but that can also make it a chilly frost pocket!

At the end of June, we thin the nascent apples. If every blossom is pollinated, there can easily be seven baby apples trying to develop right next to each other and if you allow them all to grow, you’d end up with loads of tiny apples. The tree performs its own June drop but we help it out at the end of the month to make the harvest more manageable and useful.

Signing off, Ruth 

Ruth’s recipe for apple, pear and green tomato chutney:

Before Ruth joined the team at the Mill, she worked as a chef at the Eagle in Hackney, and is a highly talented chef. Here is her flexible recipe for chutney, which she has shared with us following the harvest. 

“This recipe turned out quite jammy, which could have been because of the relatively high proportion of sweet pears I used. I find no two chutneys are the same but they’re always pretty delicious. Feel free to adjust proportions of fruits and spices depending on what you have to hand. 

Makes about 8 x 454g jars

• 2kg green tomatoes, pears and apples all roughly chopped & cores taken out of apples and pears.
• 200g finely sliced root ginger
• 200g sultanas
• 30g whole spices tied up in a piece of muslin (cinnamon sticks, allspice, cardamom, cloves, mustard seed, peppercorns & mace)
• 4 tsp sea salt
• 50g garlic, finely chopped
• 1.5 L distilled white vinegar 
• 1.25 kg dark brown muscovado sugar

Put everything in a large, heavy-bottomed pan (or split it between two pans) except the sugar.

Simmer gently until everything is soft and you’ve evaporated an inch or so of liquid.

Add the sugar and keep slowly simmering. Stir occasionally to make sure the chutney doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. 

Put clean jars into an oven at 130 degrees C for at least half an hour. Pour boiling water over the lids. Make sure they dry thoroughly.

Stop the cooking when there’s very little free liquid left in the simmering chutney. Ladle it into the hot jars. Screw on lids. Leave to cool. Don’t eat it for at least two months! Let the flavours mellow.”