Lots to do preparing for the new season, so we had an impromptu working party on the May Bank Holiday Monday, and the weather was (mostly!) kind. A great day – lots of people sowing seeds, weeding, palnting our and construcing beanpole supports! Thanks to all who came along
Constructing new beanpole structures
Beanpoles
Share food and drink May social evening, early on
The first Tuesday of the month is our social evening at the Fat Cat pub, Spring Road Ipswich. The Fat Cat is a lovely friendly real ale pub that supplies plates, knives and forks in the week to its customers. We shared a lovely meal of all kinds of dishes from the fabulous Prawn Jambalaya cooked by Jon and Debbie to Joanne’s “Hungry Gap Greens” pasta, not to mention samples of roast pork from the Acorn Antic pig club.
Lots of people came along this month, which was lovely, we needed three tables at one point of the evening! As usual a few of us were there until closing time…!
Tom, Kirsty and Kate at the bar later on
Great turnout for April’s social meeting, which is our regular opportunity to drink some beer, share food and set the world to rights.
April social meeting at the Fat Cat pub
Lots of the Community Supported Agriculture members had come up from the World Future Society ‘The Food Community‘ meeting at UCS. They felt that the CSA was already doing some of the things we will need to look at in future according to the talk.
Social meeting at the Fat Cat pub
and Lesley got to pick up her veg box fresh from the farm as well!
Lots to do here, lettuces sown in modules to go into the cold frames. Weeding, and of course spreading our piles of Mushroom compost over the ground to get it working for us and growing lots of veg!
Margaret moving the decreasing pile of mushroom compost
It was dry but a bit breezy today, so tea and coffee were very welcome. We even had to erect a temporary windbreak!
A welcome sight - tea and coffee
We also welcomed two new members, Graham and Judith, to the CSA today, with a mug of tea!
Chris on the way back for more compost
Gemma refuels with a digestive!
Our WWII V-2 rocket crater has been filled over the week with pond dredgings from a neighbour's pond in Rushmere, both filling the hole and adding fertility to our soil.
Today was also the time to recommission the farm veg box stall, overhauling it, making it a lot more sturdy and adding an insulated roof using an airspace and foil to try and fend off the summer noon-time heat to keep the boxes in top condition
Tierney and Haditha from Norwich CSA (Norwich Farmshare) had invited us along with other interested people to take a look at how Norwich Farmshare were doing things, up in Postwick near the edge of the city. Thanks to Tierney, Christophe, Haditha and everybody who welcomed us and gave us a very interesting tour round their operation.
Tierney explaining the rotation strategy up at the far end of the site
There were quite a few visitors from other parts of East Anglia – Diss CSA, Saxmundham, as well as quite a few other people interested in the great work they’ve been doing. Lucy, Kate, Fraser and Gemma came up with me, thanks to Lucy for driving us up there.
Haditha (L, with little one) who arranged the visit for us and grower Tierney (R)
Norwich Farmshare rents about 8 acres from a farmer in Postwick, with two growers, Tierney and Christoph, with help from Eric on the finances and some more help with admin. They’ve got about 90 members at the moment, with a different, more central distribution point for the veg that at the Oak Tree. Everything is harvested and taken into Norwich distribution point (near Magdalen street?) on a Thursday afternoon/evening, and members weigh their shares out and pick them up from the distribution centre. Postwick is a little bit of a way out from the city, so this is a way of working with the location of the farm and the members.
all of us by the shipping container used as a shed
Norwich is into its first year of operation, and growing for 90 people clearly keep Tierney and Christophe extremely busy, indeed it looked like they were run off their feet with work and we all really appreciated them taking some time out of their busy schedule to show us round. They also have consultancy from William, Josiah and Waveney Organics.
They have more machinery than we have at The Oak Tree, including this lovely little secondhand tractor and a range of tools
Norwich CSA tractor and tools
Like us, Christophe and Tierney have two polytunnels, one which they were getting ready and the other already had produce growing in it and providing content for the boxes, including purslane.
Christoph showing us where the beans will go in the polytunnel
At the moment there aren’t any animals at Postwick, as they have their hands full with the day to day running of the scheme.
The second polytunnel with purslane, kale and other crops being harvested
Volunteers working on the land at Norwich CSA
All in all thanks to Tierney, Christophe, Eric, and Haditha for a fascinating tour and an insight into the project. I attended one of the early meetings of Norwich CSA before they had found a site, and it was good to see the ideas turned into something which was delivering real food to members.
Glorious sunshine graced us this working party, with plenty to do, inclduing ridging the leeks, hoeing and weeding, and spreading the mushroom compost. The pigs were moved in the morning, onto the old potato field next to the parking zone. They will help get out some of the potatoes that remain in the soil and enhance the soil fertility at the same time.
Eric pruning some trees in the Forest Garden
Pigs in their new location rooting for potatoes left over from last year
Lucy hoeing the leeks
Tom weeding
The blackthorn is starting to in bloom, flowering before the leaves come out.
Blackthorn in bloom
The skylarks are busy, too
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The chickens are settling in nicely now. Our ladies came from the lovely people at The Suffolk Chicken Company , the very helpful and friendly Katie and Tom – many thanks to them for all their advice, and impromptu training on how to hold a hen which you can see here in our post about the arrival of the chickens. We’re hoping that later in the year they’ll be able to supply us with a red gene Sussex boyfriend for our ladies – that way we’ll be able to sex the chicks when they hatch (they’d be a different colour, it isn’t technical!)
inside the chicken house
They have a remarkable effect on the vegetation, doing a pretty good job of working over an area in one day. We move them on each day so they have a fresh patch of grass and clover to eat.
the patch where the chickens were yesterday can be easily seen
Chickens are back, we went to Bury to fetch these hens, which was a right old game in itself! Obviously, following in the footsteps of Mrs Beeton, the objective is First Catch Your Hen. They sit there, looking as if they are all ready to go quietly
but they’re not. Not without a lot of flapping of wings. So once you’ve caught a chicken, the trick is to pin its wings. Here we were shown how it was done:
Right. Joanne got the hang of it, sort of:
though it can’t be said that either chicken nor chicken catcher seem totally at one with the current state of the world. Then there is the conundrum of how to box the hens.
So we end up with a couple of boxes of hens
which are ready to be driven up the A14 back to the Oak Tree, where we have hauled the chicken house up to be ready to welcome them.
Joanne with a box of hens ready to be unloaded at The Oak Tree
So we unload these guys, and they just sit there in the box and go ‘Yup, we got that, so now what?’
They did finally come out and start scratching about on the grass, which is the whole point of chickens. We will move them onto fresh grass every day
Hence the happy picture of our proud owner with her hens!
The BBC couldn’t make up its mind about today’s weather. They got it more right last night in that it was going to be wet than they did this morning, when they said it would be okay apart form one or two showers. It was wet.
It was time to move the chicken house. This weighs a ton, the trick is probably to make the house out of shiplap rather than weatherboard but so be it. It needed wheels at the heavy end. Wheels are quite dear – a couple of wheelbarrow wheels would do the trick but would come to over £50, and there are thorns on the field which sometime cause punctures. So we tried sawing some wheels out of round-ish logs. The whol thing ends up looking very Fred Flintstone and doesn’t give the smoothest ride, but in the end the unevenness of the field is more than the eccentricity of the wheels. So the axle holes were made with a 30mm spade bit; it would have been easier with an auger bit but that would have been nearly £20. The holes aren’t terribly precise, and used up two batteries of the cordless drill because the wheels are made of seasoned elm.
Wilma with the new set of wheels
It wasn’t too bad down the bottom where the ground has been compacted, but then it was time to haul this up the field into pole position fo the arrival of the chickens, so it needed to move up to near the muck heap at the top of the car parking. Which was about a 300m run, across rotovated ground and then across tussocky pasture. You need to put a lot of back into moving this on that surface.
Joanne and Eric after getting the chicken house over the veg beds, taking a breather and thinking 'that was hard work' while the pigs chomp contentedly in the distance
So far so good. Unfortunately the Luftwaffe went and bombed a crater in the way, so it was an easy-ish ride down the hill and a hell of a yomp up the the other side with a grade of about 5%.
head-scratching all round 'how the heck do we budge this thing then'?
Take # 1 wasn’t successful, though it was funny 
Lesley took inspiration from the venerable farm horse. The human upright stance does us no favours as a source of motive power!
In the end it was brute force that won the day. The coop won’t be run up this incline in nrmal use so we can live with the multi-person effort required to get it out of the crater.
Eric then did a great job in reinstating some of the path through one of the steaming piles of muck that we got from Capel on Thursday.
Muck spreading
Some of you may be wondering what messy so and so left great big steaming piles all over the path at The Oak Tree. We rented a tipper truck to get a load of crap from Capel St Mary today, well that’s what it is but it’s called secondhand organic compost because it’s already been used for mushrooms. Lovely, if you like that sort of thing.
the Muck Mother Lode at Capel
The trouble is that you have to sweat the asset once you hire a truck, so there wasn’t too much time for the niceties of getting it in the right places. Compared with ditching it near the parking zone we did okay, with the aim of reducing the amount of shifting that will need to happen. First we had to get it from Capel, the place had a JCB bucket loader which made loading easy and quick.
Tipper truck with about a ton of manure, steaming gently to itself as it does...
This stuff does give off a hum, though it’s not as bad as it could be, presumably because of its preloved status…
Delivery is a breeze
Delivery to site is a breeze using a tipper truck, compared to forking it off! You do end up with a little bit of that at the end.
forking the final load