Visit to Oak Tree Farm
Joanne, head grower at Oak Tree Farm.
I visited Oak Tree Farm, near Ipswich, on a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) networking event. It was great to have a nosey round someone else’s place, and collect ideas for our own project. Lovely to meet everyone!
Polytunnel and green manure
Homemade cold frames keeping squash plants protected
Oak Tree has an immpressive expanse of comfrey, which is used to feed crops all over the farm
Peppers and tomatoes looking good...
Weeding Day 2: Done and Dusted
One of our youngest members helping her Dad with her very own mini-hoe!
Today at the farm we checked in with the onions. Coming along nicely- but so were the weeds!
Smartly dressed Paul shows us how its done!
Weeding team ready to go
We chatted about the life cycle of onions whilst working....
Thanks to Cambridge Sustainable City!
Just a mini post here to thank our brilliant sponsor Cambridge Sustainable City for a Project Grant!
What are we spending the money on?
We’re going to buy some posh Zynck-Lysbro (what a cool name!) hoes with the grant, to really get on top of those pesky weeds. These are especially light hoes, making work in the field alot easier.
Weeds here we come!!
Hoes at the ready!...
And the Royal weeding commences…
Today was our first team workday- and we got stuck in weeding our shared onion crop at Willow Farm. Here’s the team with hoes at the ready.
There were not as many weeds as usual for the time of year due to the extremely dry conditions, but that is no reason to slack off Paul…
Here’s a close up of how our onions are getting on- couple more leaves than last time!
The main weeds that...
Map for cyclists: From Stourbridge Common to Waterland Organics at Willow Farm, Lode
We’re trying to keep our transport as green as possible in our project. While we plan to take one full car of people/tools/equipment per farm workday trip when necessary, we encourage our volunteers to go along the lovely cycle route to Waterland Organics. It’s only 8 miles, and it mostly follows National Cycle Network route 51.
Here’s the full route our intrepid onion cropshare volunteers are cycling.
View Onion Cropshare cycle route to Willow...
Onion planting day
We had two teams of enthusiastic volunteers onion planting today- and it went really well!
AM: We arrived on Paul and Doreen’s farm to see our onions looking very well, in their modules. The plants had grown so much Paul thought we may have to shear off the top few inches of growth for them to fit through the planting machine! As it turned out, no haircut was necessary.
Paul had prepared about 1/2 acre of...