The Hole truth and nothing but the truth

 

This week’s CropShare farm day saw Farmer Paul (@waterlanderman on twitter) hit rock bottom as he attempted to dig himself into the ground for his winter hibernation. Read on to discover what could have driven him to this state…

First job to get stuck into was planting out 40 or so native saplings, kindly given to us by Bev as part of her Woodland Trust project – ta Bev! We dug holes and planted rowan, wild cherry, grey willow, english oak, field maple and silver birch. Looking forward to seeing these trees grow up and flourish over the years to come! But none of our tree planting holes were big enough for Farmer Paul to get into (not saying anything about your size Farmer Paul- these trees were all the width of a small pencil) so we have not yet found the source of the hole in the photo at the top of this blog…..

Well we were really busy harvesting all our beetroot today!

 

 

We stored the beetroot in a clamp – basically a massive hole dug in the ground. We took the leaves off the beetroot and packed them into net bags, piled them into our hole in the field, then covered them over with earth. You can line hole with straw if you want to. An old -fashioned but effective way of storing field veg if you haven’t got a big cold room,  beets keep cool and shoudn’t get eaten by creatures or damaged by frost. I love clamps.

Lets hope we can remember where we buried them to dig them up over the winter…anyone make a beet treasure map? Hee hee.

And even this beetroot clamp wasn’t the hole that Farmer Paul is enjoying at the beginning of this post, no that comes next…

So a spot of moving around irrigation pipes before winter sets in uncovered a massive hole which Farmer Paul immeadiately jumped into. “You could live in here!” we heard him cry as we backed away carefully. We think  the now famous hole was made by a leak in the pipe eroding away some of the soil, or it could have been a woodland creature. Either way it made Paul happy- look:

Someone else that got dumped in a hole today was CropSharer Matt who came a cropper headfirst in a pile of haybales….

This is what happens when you don’t meet your beetroot harvest quota on CropShare days 😉 JOKING!!

Matt managed to recover from his ordeal and was not scarred for life, managing to come into contact with bales again without getting flashbacks to have a relaxed sitdown at lunch.  Lunch!! I knew there was something we forgot to take photos of! Probably too busy scoffing it- our bring and share lunch was delicious and colourful as always and filled us up ready for the afternoon’s exploits.

There was also LOADS of luvly veg to take away as rewards today as it’s one of the most plentiful harvest seasons on the farm with onions, kale, squash, apples, potatoes, fennel, a bit of sweetcorn and of course beetroot all available for our hard-working volunteers to take home. Well done guys eat your greens!

We then needed to make some more holes in the ground as we bashed in some new fence posts around the orchard, to keep it safe from the sheep and rabbits. Job done!

Last thing to do was to tuck in some cabbage, kale and broad bean plants with a mesh to keep off the birds and protect from any frosts. After reading them a bedtime story we cycled home.

 

And finally…

Here’s a few snaps of when the CropShare Crew spent a night on the town and invaded the Flying Pig pub with plenty of apples and kale… as you  can see we had a right laugh! Thanks for having us the Pig!