Coming up on Sept 21 and 22: Rosh Hashana Market in the Orchard

Come and participate in an apple tasting, orchard tours and lots more in midtown Toronto’s Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard.

Do you know the difference between a McIntosh apple and a Silken Apple? What about between a Honeycrisp apple and a Ginger Gold? Come to join the volunteers of the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard at the upcoming Rosh Hashana Market in Ben Nobleman Park on September 21 and 22 from 10 am to 4pm.

Participate in a free apple tasting session during the Rosh Hashana Market in Ben Noblmean Park Community Orchard on September 21 and 22, 2019 between 10 am and 4pm. We will have tastings of McIntosh, Honeycrisp, Silken, Ginger Gold and Gala.

Apple Tasting and Orchard Tours in MidTown Toronto

At the event, we will have an Apple Education Table sponsored by Ontario Apple Growers where you can taste 5 different apple cultivars and vote for your favorite apple. And we’ll have twice daily orchard tours at 12 noon and 2pm where you can learn the secrets of growing fruit trees in a public space.

The tour leader is Susan Poizner, author of the award-winning fruit tree care book Growing Urban Orchards and creator of the online fruit tree care training portal at www.orchardpeople.com. Susan is also the coordinator and co-founder of The Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard.

In addition to orchard tours and apple tastings, the park will be filled with booths and activities during the Rosh Hashana event, organized by the Upper Village BIA. There will be artisan booths, baked goods, children’s activities, face painting and lots more.

Celebrate Rosh Hashana with Apples and Honey

Apples are central to the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, which marks the new year on the Hebrew calendar. At Rosh Hashana meals, guests are encouraged to eat apples dipped in honey to symbolize a sweet year to come.

And Ben Nobleman Park is a perfect place to celebrate as it’s the first public park in the City of Toronto to become to a community orchard. We planted our fruit trees in 2009 and we grow apple trees as well as crabapples, cherries, apricots, Asian pears and plums in the park. You can find the list of fruit tree cultivars that we grow here.

Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard Volunteers Annie and Marilyn weed around the apple trees while they prepare the park for the big event on September 21 and 22, 2019.

See Our Historic Harvest Table

The community orchard is run by volunteers who spend up to 200 volunteer hours a year caring for the orchard’s trees and for our huge pollinator garden. We also raised money through a Live Green Toronto Grant to build a huge harvest table in the park, made out of huge beams of reclaimed wood that were once part of Toronto’s first docklands.

This September, Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard volunteers (Ruth, Marilyn, Sherry, Annie, Lynn and Susan) spend a morning scrubbing our harvest table to prepare for the Rosh Hashana Event. This table is made from huge beams of wood reclaimed from Toronto’s first docklands. The wood had been buried under landfill for over a century.

Meet the Volunteers of Ben Nobleman “BARK” Community Orchard.

If you’re curious about fruit trees, if you love apples, and if you’re interested in having a great family day out, do come and join us in the orchard for our event. And if you’d like to join our group and get involved in a fantastic community urban agriculture project, send an email to Lynn at growingforgreen (at) gmail.com. We are mostly human volunteers but we do have one or two canine friends who help us, as you can see from the video below taken in the orchard recently.

We look forward to meeting you in the orchard!

Orchard volunteers always need to clean around the base of the trees to remove fallen fruit that may harbour fruit tree pests and maggots. But we have canine assistance! Stella is a local bulldog who helps us deal with windfall (or fallen) apples. See her in action in the video!

Susan Poizner is the coordinator of The Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard in Toronto and the author of the award-winning fruit tree care book Growing Urban Orchards. Susan teaches fruit tree care skills online at he fruit tree care training website OrchardPeople.com. Susan is also the host of The Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast, a show that explores topics relating to fruit trees, food forests, permaculture and arboriculture. She is also an ISA Certified arborist.