There could be more than 500 varieties of apple on display at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, on October 17-18.
The Garden’s ever-popular Apple Weekend – the Carmarthenshire attraction’s sixth annual celebration of everyone’s favourite fruit – goes from strength to strength with the promise of another bumper crop of fruit and apple-related products available to taste and buy.
Apple experts will be at the Garden for the two days displaying the incredible variety of fruit and offering tastings. Many varieties will be on sale.
To complement the apples, there will be a mini-food fair featuring home-made cakes, chutney, cider and toffee apple stalls, as well as stalls selling local pork and a variety of local cheeses.
The Garden restaurant will have a specially-themed Apple Weekend menu and horticulturist Malcolm Berry will be giving “growing, training, pruning” talks in the Double Walled Garden.
Local nurseryman Paul Davis – who runs Dolau Hirion nursery at Capel Isaac, near Carmarthen – will be on hand to offer tips about picking the right apple tree for you and how to care for it to get the best crop. He will also have a limited number of trees for sale.
Have you got an old apple tree and you don’t know what it is? Then bring some apples along and get them identified.
All you need to do is bring two or three apples from each tree, making sure the apples are typical fruits and that they are intact, the stalk is very important; also don’t wash or polish them! Please remember that windfalls, bruised and damaged apples cannot easily be identified.
• Go to www.gardenofwales.org.uk for more information, or call 01558 668768
• Normal entry prices apply during the festival: adults £8, concessions £6.50 and children (5-16 years) £4, under-fives, free.A familt ticket (2 adults and up to 4 children) is £19.50. The Garden is open from 10am until 6pm on both days. Last entry, 5pm.
