Well, it’s March 2020 and the world is changing more and more every day as the Corona Virus continues to spread around the world. Here in Canada, our government is doing what they can to slow down the spread of the virus by closing schools and libraries, shutting museums, and discouraging large gatherings.

But life goes on in Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard. The trees still need their annual pruning and pest prevention work at this time of year. And the volunteers are hankering to get outside and interact with nature and each other. To protect everyone, we have now declared our park an official “no hugging zone” (we elbow bump instead and it is kind of fun too).

In the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard we have lots of fun caring for our fruit trees and pollinator garden. And each year we get to enjoy the harvest with delicious organic fruit including apricots, plums, cherries, and Asian pears.

But we rarely get to taste the apples that we grow. The problem is that park visitors harvest our fruit as they walk through the park. It’s easy to know when cherries and plums are ripe. But it’s harder to identify when apples are ripe if you aren’t familiar with the cultivar. So people harvest our apples before they are ripe. By harvest time in September and October, our trees are usually bare.

It’s fall and there’s lots of reason to celebrate. It’s harvest time. The weather is beautiful. And also we’re coming up to the joyful Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana – The Jewish New Year. It’s traditional during Rosh Hashana to enjoy apples dipped in honey, a treat that symbolizes a sweet new year. So our local business improvement association, The Upper Village BIA, decided to have a Rosh Hashana Market in our local park and invited the whole community to participate and enjoy this wonderful holiday together.

For the volunteers of The Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard, this was also a really fun opportunity to educate the public about the many different apple cultivars that you can grow locally and we did that through an apple tasting event. Ontario Apple Growers supplied us with 5 different types of apples for the public to taste. Then we asked park visitors to vote on their favorite by putting a bean in the mason jar for their favorite cultivar.