Happy New Year! And My Plans for Orchard Notes in 2025

A Very Happy New Year to you! Did you have a good holiday season, of whatever sort you celebrate? I sincerely hope so.

I ended up taking the majority of the second half of December off, both from work and from posting new articles here on Orchard Notes. The latter was a deliberate break, to give myself time to unwind, relax and recharge my ideas for the site, some of which I’d like to share with you now. If you feel like commenting, or making a suggestion as to the sort of content you’d like to see more of on Orchard Notes, then please do feel free. Any and all feedback would be most welcome, either via the comments below, or privately via email if you prefer.

The most important thing that I’d very much like to work towards in 2025 is developing a much more regular writing and posting habit. I use the word ‘habit’ quite deliberately, because a good habit is something that will develop and strengthen over time. As a result I’ll eventually find myself doing it quite naturally, without too much mental effort, and I’ll feel good about it too¹If you’re interested in the science and psychology of habit formation I can highly recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear and for more on the wider field of mental heuristics, You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney.. Whereas I know that if I try to fix a specific target for a number of posts per week, or even just a goal of X posts by Y date, then I’ll be setting myself up to fail: I’ll put undue pressure on myself, I’ll be highly likely to miss that target sooner or later, and then I’ll just feel bad, which will be counter-productive²And will lead to excessive gaming. I’ve been a player of the Sid Meier’s Civilization series for 30+ years, but I’ve recently discovered the joys of Old World. If you’re a 4X fan then I can heartily recommend giving the latter a go, for what I feel is a much more satisfyingly narrative-driven and immersive strategy gaming experience. But I probably shouldn’t have told you that. I’m very sorry in advance for the time-sink I’ve just introduced you to.. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m also planning – weather allowing – to devote more time and attention to the non-fruit-tree parts of my allotment plot this year, after a couple of frustratingly less-than-stellar growing seasons. That will involve spending more weekend mornings at the plot and therefore fewer at the keyboard, which will inevitably have an impact on how much new material I can produce for Orchard Notes.

I’m therefore going to try to nudge my writing habit in the direction of posting more seasonally relevant articles in shorter, bite-size formats. Feature articles will probably be less frequent, perhaps limited to one a month. I’m still aiming to complete my history of the ‘Beefing’ group of apples³Sunk Cost Fallacy be damned, it’s too interesting a story not to finish telling it. and that will involve a “second edition” re-write of my history of Norfolk Biffins as well⁴Much of the re-researching for which I’ve been engaged in these past few weeks; fascinating stuff, if you happen to be fascinated by that sort of thing.. And my next major research project into the science of how fruit trees grow and how the theoretical principles can be turned into practical orcharding applications will hopefully get underway once the ‘Beefing’ project is done⁵Although I’ve been saying that for four years now, so please don’t hold your breath.

But I’ll be trying really hard to avoid getting lost for weeks in side-projects like researching Ancient Roman apple varieties, or other similarly diverting research rabbit-holes. Wish me luck.

I will also continue to post historical fruit recipes, quirky quotations from works of pomology that snag my interest, orchard photo galleries, and hopefully more book notes reviews, and details of orchard visits, although the latter two items are surprisingly time-consuming to produce, so we’ll see. And I have an idea that revolves around hosting more with conversations with, or between, fellow orchardists, pomologists and fruit enthusiasts, although again that sort of post can take quite a lot of time to organise and write, so it might be an idea to work on over the longer term.

Finally, I’d very much like to increase the general usefulness of Orchard Notes, by beefing up the information that the site provides, and highlighting the work done by other individuals and organisations in the field of fruit growing, orcharding and pomology. I already have the books section of the site, with access to the larger pomology bibliography that I’ve been compiling, and I’ll continue to add to that. I’m also thinking of introducing a good, old-fashioned links library, to provide a route to orcharding organisations, specialist fruit nurseries, and fellow bloggers and fruit writers, for anyone who might be looking for trusted sources of reliable information. Again, that will be time-dependent, so we’ll see.

Finally, after four years of the old, pale green website template, I’ve been working on⁶Well, I say “working on”, but of course I mean “installing a new WordPress theme and tinkering with the settings. a re-vamped design. Depending on when you’re reading this, it might be live already, in which case, please do let me know what you think of the new design.

Well, those are my thoughts and vague plans for the year ahead. I’d love to know what you think, especially if you’re a regular visitor to the site, and/or a member of the Orchard Notes email list. As I mentioned before, all feedback is hugely welcome, either via the comments below if you’d like to invite wider discussion, or privately via email if you perhaps want to tell me about all the bits of the site you’re not too keen on, but don’t want to do so in public. It would be great if you could spare a couple of minutes to drop me a line.

Footnotes

• 1
  If you’re interested in the science and psychology of habit formation I can highly recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear and for more on the wider field of mental heuristics, You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney. ↩︎
• 2
  And will lead to excessive gaming. I’ve been a player of the Sid Meier’s Civilization series for 30+ years, but I’ve recently discovered the joys of Old World. If you’re a 4X fan then I can heartily recommend giving the latter a go, for what I feel is a much more satisfyingly narrative-driven and immersive strategy gaming experience. But I probably shouldn’t have told you that. I’m very sorry in advance for the time-sink I’ve just introduced you to. ↩︎
• 3
  Sunk Cost Fallacy be damned, it’s too interesting a story not to finish telling it. ↩︎
• 4
  Much of the re-researching for which I’ve been engaged in these past few weeks; fascinating stuff, if you happen to be fascinated by that sort of thing. ↩︎
• 5
  Although I’ve been saying that for four years now, so please don’t hold your breath ↩︎
• 6
  Well, I say “working on”, but of course I mean “installing a new WordPress theme and tinkering with the settings. ↩︎