Transition Cafe night with Hempsals Community Farm
We held a fun information evening at one of the regular Transition Cafe nights in CB1 on Mill Road with another Cambridgeshire Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project. We invited the brilliant Hempsals Community Farm to help us talk about the many benefits of CSA, and answer questions from a very interested audience. We heard how both CSAs had grown and were providing food and fun for their communities. Thanks to Hempsals for joing us and...
Prizewinning Cropshare onions at Cambridge Food and Garden Festival
Second prize!
We had a great time at the Transition Cambridge Food Group stall at Cambridge Food and Garden Festival.
As well as chatting to people about our community farming project, we were braiding our onions and teaching others how to too!
In a great finish to the day, our onions won second prize.
Thanks to all our volunteers who came to lend a hand....
Community Supported Agriculture conference- Bristol
Commmunity Supported Agriculture, or CSA, is the name of the game here at Cambridge Cropshare. There’s many different forms of CSA, but our project works by bringing volunteers of all veggie-growing abilities onto an existing local farm to help with everyday farm tasks. Our volunteers are rewarded with a share of the crop we produce together at harvest.
There was plenty of information on existing CSAs in the UK and beyond
Two Cropshare members were able...
Harvest Party!
Finally the time has come to harvest our carefully grown onion crop. When we arrived at the farm, we could see all the onions we laid out on the soil two weeks ago were dried out, excellent!
Then it was up to us to remove most of the dead leaves and bag the onions into dayglow orange nets. We even had time for a few juggling tricks- thanks for the entertainment Isabel!
Our marvelous harvest was...
Onion lifting day!
From Cambridge Onion Cropshare Scheme
Today was the day we lifted our sharecrop onions! It’s that time in the season where we need to stop the onions growing and dry them out in good weather to keep for over-winter storage.
From Cambridge Onion Cropshare Scheme
First off, Paul topped the crop using a cutter. Removing the top of the leaves like this helps speed up the drying process.
From Cambridge Onion Cropshare Scheme
Then it was up to our
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Animals at Waterland Organics Farm
I know we’re strictly only there for the onions this year, but in this blog post we’re giving you a sneaky peek at the animals we see every time we go down to Waterland to tend our onions.
From Cambridge Onion Cropshare Scheme
This friendly ferret wakes up occasionally to say hello to us.
From Cambridge Onion Cropshare Scheme
Where would a farmhouse be without a cat and dog? Sky the border collie gets really excited when all...
Weeding day 4: King onion!
From Cambridge Onion Cropshare Scheme
Let’s open this blog post with a big photo of our well tended onions!
At the farm this time, our onions were looking bulked up and in full health. But what’s good for onions- plenty of rain and sunshine- meant the weeds weren’t far behind and needed knocking back.
This time round we learnt that red onions are not as vigorous growers as white, and we could see a heavier weed burden...
Views from the cycle ride to our farm
Every farm workday, a group of our volunteers cycle from Cambridge centre to our onion plot. Check our earlier blog post for our cycle route. Just thought I would share with you some views from our cycle ride, as its a lovely part of the day.
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Cropshare in Cambridge Newspaper
Thanks to Lizzy Dening and David Johnson for featuring us in Saturday’s paper here in Cambridge!
If you read about us and want to get in contact- why not leave a comment here, and I’ll get back to you....
Weeding day 3: success!
We had a great time at our latest meet at Waterland Organics Farm. Our onions are really putting on the pounds now, and as the days get shorter they will start to bulk up quickly. Just looking back to some of our first posts its easy to see how much our crop has grown!
From Cambridge Onion Cropshare Scheme
Alas, the weeds have also grown…thistles, charlock and persicaria (Redshank)-but we got straight onto them with our...