WE NEED YOUR HELP!
This year has been an exceptional year for growers in the Similkameen Valley, with many crops coming in three (or more) weeks early. That isn’t a bad thing, but it does create a difficulty for one of our most popular annual events, Apple Day.
Traditionally, our Apple Day is on Thanksgiving Monday in the middle of October, but with such an early season there will likely not be many heritage varieties still in their prime that late. As such, we’ve had to make the difficult decision to move up our Apple Day festivities and include them, instead, in our Heritage Fall Fair on September 20th. Also, many of our usual apple-loving volunteers will be hard at work in their orchards at that time, and will be less able to help than they usually are.
Here’s where you can help… We’re already pretty busy with organizing the rest of our Fall Fair, so need some extra volunteer assistance with pulling together the apple component. That means helping track down orchards in the region with heritage varieties, helping set up an informative display, helping run some apple-related activities that day and more.
If you’re interested in lending a hand or maybe have a lead on someone with heritage apple varieties in their orchard in the Similkameen or South Okanagan, please drop Chris a line at chris@oldgristmill.ca or at 250-499-2888 as soon as possible.
If you’re curious about the sorts of heritage varieties we’re interested in, here’s a list of many of the kinds of apples grown historically in the Okanagan:
Thanks, and please help us spread the word!