Every day, I get to the office really early, sometimes before noon, pick up my online issue of Lincolnshire World from the letterbox, and settle down to read with a cuppa before the hurly-burly work day starts

So it was that I was one of the first people this morning to read the article that Lincolnshire World wrote about the Wilsford Community Orchard Group in January 2024.

The WCOG planned back then to plant an orchard and community space on land provided by Mr Henry Tickler, with £15,100 provided by The Coronation Living Heritage Fund.

I would love to know how they are getting on, so I’m writing about them to see if they get in touch, and let me know what they’ve planted so far.
I could ask if they have a social media account for people to like-share-subscribe, enquire about how that 15 grand is doing, maybe I can help them look after some of it … I’m just nice like that.

According to Jacky Scott-Combes, the veteran psychotherapist who got this project off the ground,

“We’re offering adopt-a-tree or dedicate-a-tree, and working with the East of England Orchard Project to see if we can plant heritage varieties from the area.
We’re hoping to plant apples, including cider apples, plus pears, plums, cherries and maybe even nut species.
Thanks to Mr Tickler, there’s plenty of land to do more than plant the orchard, we want to make it a real community space and could potentially even have a timber-framed building where we could hold events, have workshops and education opportunities, and even dementia and mental health-related activities.”

I was so inspired by the Wilsford Community Orchard Group’s hope for the future that I instructed the Ashridge Band to write a song for them.

By the way, the Ashridge Band is totally real and really exists. Look, here they are performing live at Glostunberry Festival: