Apples are amazing and so we at the Storehouse have decided to dedicate October to celebrating these delicious and nutritious fruit! We have 4 apple pressing days scheduled, extra apple varieties on sale as well as lots of apple flavoured treats from our kitchen.
To wet your appetite for our apple festivities, here are some fun facts about apples!
Apple growing has been part of life on the British Isles back to Roman times. To the Celtic peoples the tree represented everlasting life and knowledge. During the Middle ages, apples were associated with love and fertility.
There are nearly 8,000 different types of apples around the world with 2,000 varieties in the UK alone. So would possible to have a British grown apple a day for 5 and a half years without having the same type twice!
In Britain, we consume around 122,000 tonnes of apples a year – that’s enough to fill 325 Olympic swimming pools.
Apples float in water because a whopping 25% of their volume is actually air. Apple bobbing has long been part of Halloween traditions due to this.
Bobbing in water has at times been replaced with hanging apples from a beam and having people try and catch them with their mouths,
Apples feature in many superstitions, including wassailing – a Twelfth Night custom of visiting orchards to sing to the trees and spirits in the hope of ensuring a good harvest, planting apple as a 'Birth Tree' in celebration of the birth of a boy and peeling an apple in one continuous strip and tossing it over one’s shoulder to reveal the initial of a future spouse. Even science is not immune to the lure of folklore. One of the best known stories in British history is of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree one day when an apple falls onto his head leading to his formulation of the Law of Universal Gravitation.