Its been another fun week here at the farm, although we’ve got a lot less done than hoped for, due in large part to the heat and drought.

On Wednesday, we had the usual workday with the toddlers aswell as a first working visit from Neil who came along so unencumbered and thus managed to achieve far more than the rest of us combined!

After last weeks sowing of barley seed, I wanted another scarecrow out in the fields to keep the birds off this new patch. As we already have a rather handsome chap in the goose field, Emma kindly donated an old maternity dress for us to build him a partner. The kids got stuck in with stuffing the bags with straw but it was the grown ups who enjoyed putting the finishing touches to ‘Pamela’!

Meanwhile, Neil was digging out a trench round the polytunnel to bury the remaining plastic in and he also gave the strawberries a much needed soaking. We also had time to take our new ducklings out for their first swim and enjoy some Easter cakes.

The Saturday workday this week was very busy, we had half our families coming out and everyone was invited to stay on after the work had finished for a BBQ in the beautiful sunshine. Most of us set down to building more fruit and veg beds for the perennial plots. Some were smashing up old pallets in to boards for edging the beds, these where then taken out to the field and assembled in place. Finally, a brave few attempted to dig over the newly laid out beds, struggling to break through the dried out clay. However by the end of the day we’d finished another five beds – double the number there at the start of the day. Whilst all this was going on in the fields, Kriss and Dan were applying the finishing touches to the top-bar bee hive by fitting a box along the bottom complete with inspection tray.

The children were kept entertained in the garden by some Easter crafts and games. The toddlers all decorated some of the farm’s eggs and later rolled them down a ramp until they broke. There was also an Easter egg hunt round the garden – all organised by Emma and all of which was great fun.

We stopped around five o’clock for a barbeque to which everyone brought along a contribution. It was a really nice opportunity to sit and have a chat and for members to get to know each other.

We had some more new arrivals in the week – our first hatch of ducklings! We’ve managed to hatch six Khaki Campbells to keep for the eggs and three Aylesbury’s which were got in the hope of getting a drake to go with our existing two girls and keep us in roast duck next year!

This Saturday afternoon was spent out in one of our fields which had been cleared of oilseed rape over the past week or so and was no ready to be planted – give or take a bit of rotavating! Everyone took turns at the various jobs on offer, clearing away the cut rape stems, having a go on the hired rotavator, scraping our drills, dropping in seeds and finally raking back soil over the top. We managed to plant all of our fodder beet and about a third of our spring barley but there’s enough ground cleared and rotavated for me to plant a lot more barley tomorrow afternoon. The fodder beet and most of the barley is being grown for animal feed, but I’m hoping we can spare a little of the barley to experiment with some traditional brewing techniques later in the year.

We all worked so hard out in the glorious sunshine that the only photos I managed of the day were taken when we all stopped for tea and delicious chocolate cake – thanks Caroline!

We had a trip out to Potton on Sunday to pick up some more weaners for the farm. It was mine and Matt’s third time to get pigs and we have begun to get a bit complacent about how straight forward it would all be – to the extent that I forgot to take and pictures of the pigs at all! We picked up four saddleback boars.

The little fellows are still a little bit skittish but slowly getting used to all the visitors. The old spots by contrast are very tame now and come running up to see you and rub against your legs or chew your shoes.

The Wednesday workday was spent planting up some seeds: rhubarb, artichoke and more sunflowers. The sunflowers are a giant variety which we’re hoping to use in a sunflower growing competition over the summer.

It was another glorious day down on the farm today. The first job of the afternoon was to apply some sun block to the pigs’ ears. Our old spots have fair skin and do burn easily on glorious days like these. They do their best to keep cool and covered by wallowing in mud but however hard they try, the tops of their ears are always clear so out comes the factor 50!

We had two big jobs to do today, building another pig ark and clearing a mass of oil seed rape. We started off by clearing the line of the electric fence and some space in the pig field for the ark. The plan for the structure was simple enough, fence posts driven in to the corners, clad with board walls and a corrugated iron roof. So, we went back to the farmyard to cut the OSB walls to shape and roughly cut the roof purlins. Back out in the field, we spent most time getting the fence posts in vertically enough so that the boards fit neatly. We needed a bit of adjustment to the morticed joints for the roof but eventually it was all bodged together in time to screw down the roof and call it a day, ready for some saddleback weaners to move in tomorrow!

The other half of our team today spent the afternoon down the farm clearing a huge area of oil seed rape from one of the fields that we want to seed with fodder beet and spring barley. It was hard work in the warm sunshine, although a light breeze provided some relief. I have to say I spent very little time down there today after having spent the afternoon scything on Friday and knowing I’ll be back there on Monday it was lovely to have a break. It can’t have been that bad though as we found Trevor still scything away long after we’d retired home for dinner! Hopefully all this work will mean that we can get the field rotavated this coming week and perhaps next weekend we can do the far more pleasant job of sowing some seeds.

We had a lot of fun this afternoon at our Wednesday workday with the kids out in force. The weather was glorious so we started off by planting a row of dwarf sunflowers along the back fence of the goose field. Sunflowers have nice big seeds which mean that the toddlers can really get involved, making holes in the soil, popping in the seeds and then watering them in.

A quick break for drinks and snacks and then the grownups (Sharon, Hanna and myself) then got down to some serious work, setting out and digging over another bed in our perennial field. The lovely spring day finished off with an egg hunt round the new chicken run to find all the new places that the hens are choosing.

Apologies for failing to take any photos this time – I blame the toddler taming – instead I’ll have to end with an old picture of the kids putting up the scarecrow last week!

On Saturday 3rd April (and some of Sunday), Some of the members of the community farm got together to build a Horizontal Top Bar Hive (TBH) with the intention of keeping bees on the farm to help pollination and for a little honey and wax too. Dan is a keen beekeeper and had come across an interesting design detailed by Phil Chandler of biobees.com. Phil argues that the current ways of keeping bees in framed beekeeping (as discovered and developed by langstroth in the 1850s) is rather un-natural for the bees and modern beekeeping practice might be the cause of some of the population decline that we have been seeing in honey bees globally. Whilst modern agricultural practice does not help matters, there are ways in which we can help honey bee colonies be as strong as possible by living as close to the way they would natively (after all, apis mellifera have been around a lot longer than humans and are thus a very highly successful species).
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

Another really busy and productive day down on the farm today. We had a lot of new families coming out to visit the farm for the first time and I’m happy to say that all of them have signed up as new members so we’re very nearly at our capacity for this year now!

The piglets were a big hit as they are getting quite used to people and happily come up to anyone for a scratch or a rub. They’ve put on a lot of weight already and dug over all of their initial area in just a couple of weeks so it was time to move the electric fence on to another patch. We also wanted to get the main chicken coop down into the woodland and Caroline brought a donation of 48 strawberry plants that needed planting out.

However, the main focus of work was the effort, led by Dan, to build a top-bar bee hive. I’ll not go in to all the detail here as Dan is preparing a full write up and Kriss shot some video of the whole process that will go up on youtube but I can confide that our skilled team of craftsmen have managed to turn a pile of wood (bought from a great local social enterprise – Cambridge Wood Works) into a true work of art! A step by step guide of the whole process has been written up by Dan.

Caroline, Rebecca and Trevor all worked hard one the new strawberry beds, finding out just how hard work it can be digging over the heavy clay soil we have in the fens. They still managed to get all three new beds of strawberries planted and watered in.

By the time the sun set over the fields, we’d finished our planned jobs for the day and have met most of the families we’ll be working with throught this year – a great day!