Volunteering days
New life pushing through
Spring is truly underway (although as always there’s still the chance of nature catching us unaware with a hard frost or two) so work is steadily gearing up on the farm.
Dave has started off the first seeds, and is about to get the beds ready for planting out: in the next few weeks he’ll be mowing and covering the green manures, sowing some early salad herbs and radishes in the small tunnel and beginning to cultivate the areas we tarped earlier in the year ready for sowing broad beans and some early outdoor greens.
Our hope is that in April we’ll be able to name a regular drop-in volunteer day, probably midweek, when anyone is free to stop by and join in with the work. However Dave needs to get a bit more of a feel for the rhythm of the place before we start doing that so in the meantime we’ve picked out some key jobs that need doing and are going to have some dedicated weekend volunteer days.
These will all be Sundays from 2pm:
24th March: soil testing
7th April: planting out brassicas
14th April: planting out onions
28th April: tarping new beds
March 24th promises to be an interesting one: an important principle for us is to farm in a way that builds soil health and biodiversity, so we’ll be taking “biodiversity readings” (also known as counting worms) across the site to give us a baseline measurement which we will hopefully be improving on significantly over the next couple of years. It should be a fun afternoon, and a particularly good one to bring kids along for.
Last year’s tarping session
Then in early April its planting out time and lots of work to be done taking the seedlings and planting them out. We’ve pencilled in brassicas and onions on the 7th and 14th respectively but what we plant out on any particular day will of course depend on how advanced the seedlings are and what the weather conditions look like.
Finally, we need to get more land under cultivation! So by end April we’ll be ready to lift the tarps we laid in January and move them to a new patch. It’s heavy work so we’d love loads of volunteers for that session (as ever refreshments will be provided).
Hope to see some of you on those days! Reply by email if you’re interested and let us know which dates you can come so we get an idea of numbers.
