Really lovely work party today. Great to welcome some new people to the farm. We mulched beds in anticipation of more hot and dry weather, planted out comfrey and harvested shallots.

Bramble time! Just a trickle for now, but it’ll soon be a deluge.

Another year at Groundswell. As ever, lots of informative talks and a great opportunity to catch up with old and new faces.

Seed saving now starting in earnest. These poppies popped up on one of our tracks so we’ve been saving seed for cooking and sowing again next year on some of our rough margins. Anyone have some good recipes where we can use volumes of this in the kitchen?

Two exciting new additions to the farm species list today, a lesser stag beetle and a marbled white butterfly. Our deadwood habitats and rough grassland seem to be working their magic!

Harvested the first of our onions. They’ll be left to cure for two weeks before putting into storage. It’s been a tricky year for them; we’ve had a lot of them begin to bolt due to the extreme temps and drought. We’ll chop these and freeze for home use as they won’t store well.

We were appreciative of the extra help today digging out bramble roots in the East section of our glasshouse. Hot and sweaty work. We didn’t quite get the area renovated this winter for this growing season but we should be set for next. It’ll increase our indoor growing area from 450m2 to 950m2.

Courgettes starting to produce decent volumes now. We have three different varieties this year. We often make this Greek Cypriot side dish Kolokouthkia me t’afka - courgette and eggs. Fry courgette in olive oil, season, then fold in eggs and cook until just set. Simple but delicious

Nice little harvest this morning for someone. First of the new potatoes and courgette are now in the mix.

Here’s some greens that have thrived in the heat where other species would have bolted. Callaloo and New Zealand spinach make up our summer greens, with ‘true’ spinach being grown in the cooler shoulder seasons. The tricky part is selling them; they’re relatively unknown here.

It’s a brutal scene out there. Plants wilting, panicking and bolting. Seedlings frying in the sun. Strawberries ripening and rotting in the blink of an eye. Despite all the mitigations we’re putting in place, everything is struggling. This is the new normal.

Great to chat all things ecology and small scale farming with the conservation community at the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge today.

First harvest of basil. We use it as an understory support plant in our glasshouse. It requires regular pinching out of the growing tips to encourage it to bush out. Pesto for dinner it is for us then

First one!

We’re making our first harvests of cucumber. We have three varieties this year; our favourite ‘Tamra’, as well as a more traditional long cucumber ‘Gergana’ and a small cucumber ‘Boothbys Blonde’. The Boothbys has proved very popular with the kids for snacks.

Doing the rounds this evening and bumped into our resident barn owl. Watched it hunting over the market garden and it even went through the glasshouse!

Yesterday evening we had a visit from the Woodcraft Folk. We showed twenty 10-13 year olds around the site who had the opportunity to explore and help with tasks in the market garden. We were super impressed by their enthusiasm and loved all the insightful questions.

Nice pick of greens today heading out for a local event. A mix of kales plus New Zealand spinach.

This is our second year growing wheat from home saved grains. Our aim is to develop a ‘land race’ of genetically diverse plants well adapted to our environment. We plan to upscale next year and have community sowing, scything, threshing, winnowing and bread baking events!

Strawberries producing strongly now. Also a first crop of loganberries for us.

Lifted our garlic today. The heads are huge! They’ve done well considering the variable weather but we were starting to get some rust and bulb splitting issues. We’ll cure them for a few weeks before grading them and putting into storage.

Chopping up comfrey leaves to mulch our glasshouse plants. We grow comfrey around the site, especially in areas of high fertility. They have deep roots that bring up minerals and nutrient. We then chop the leaves and move to where needed. Comfrey can be harvested 3 times per year.

First year we’ve had a decent haul off our currants. Made some blackcurrant juice!

We are getting more and more low tech when it comes to our approach to mushroom cultivation. Today we broke down our existing oyster mushroom columns to start a new batch. We mixed the mycelium with fresh deciduous woodchip, added to crates and wet down. Now it’s a waiting game

We’re making headway with our new seed sowing section in the glasshouse. We’ve built the potting bench, next it’s a handwash station and shelving and storage units. It’ll be a big upgrade from our current set up.

First cucumber! This is a variety called Tamra and it’s long been our favourite. We pick them small, they’re thin skinned and incredibly tasty. We’re having this one for tea.

First Google Maps update since we moved on site in 2021. You can see just how much has been done. Ponds, market garden, agroforestry rows, scrub blocks and glasshouse renovations to name a few.

First of the peas getting hoovered up! A lot of these will get eaten fresh with the rest being shelled and frozen down for the winter months. This variety is Kelvedon Wonder and plants were grown from home-saved seed

240 sweetcorn plants are in the ground. This is our third year of growing from saved seed, using open pollinated varieties. We’re also trying three other corn varieties this year; a flint corn, a parched corn and a variety for polenta.

In the past 24 hours we’ve had a gigantic volume of woodchip dropped! Over 20m3 in all. This stuff is absolute rocket fuel for the farms ecology and fertility. We spent the entire day mulching the glasshouse, it’s completely transformed the place.

A massive grass snake seems to have taken up residence right in the middle of our market garden.

Flipping the beds in the polytunnel. Our early season crop of spinach, salads and herbs has been harvested. Today we chopped and dropped what was left and have planted up melons and watermelons. We’re hoping the overwintered onions will bulb up before they get swamped!

We aim to have the East section of the glasshouse fully cleared and ready for production next season. This year we were able to plant up the canopy layer (cherry, apricot, peach & nectarine) and have trialled a bed of potatoes and broad beans The first harvest is looking good!

Common lizard standing guard over our new brassica cage. Hopefully they’ll do a good job of keeping the pests off our cabbages

First punnet of strawberries!

We headed out on a bike ride to Fen Drayton yesterday. If you want to hear cuckoos calling in stereo it’s well worth a visit!

Big day of planting out. It feels late but we’ve been waiting for a weather window that hasn’t been too cold or too hot. We start the majority of our veg in cell trays which are planted out when ready. It’s more work but has a much higher success rate for us.

Hannah has been hard at work planting up the new brassica and fruit cage. We’ve gone for circular beds to account for the central water sprinkler. Strawberry, cabbage, cauliflower, kale and climbing beans have all gone in today.

An impressive lightning storm over the farm last night, but unfortunately bringing only a smattering of rain

We’re in the final stages of constructing a 12x10m brassica and soft fruit cage. Being surrounded by large scale arable fields we get flocks of woodpigeons descend and decimate any brassica, pea, leafy green that isn’t covered. This should hopefully sort us out.

It’s a brutal scene here at the farm. Lots of water and heat stressed plants. Yesterday was a record breaking temperature for May, with a similar outlook today. This heat, compounded with drought, late frosts and strong winds, make for an incredibly complex growing environment.

Glasshouse now fully planted up! Tomato, cucumber, melon, watermelon, aubergine, pepper, tomatillo, physalis, okra, chilli, strawberry and flowers with a canopy layer of cherry, apricot, nectarine, peach, fig, pomegranate and persimmon. Phew!

Got round to rebuilding the strawberry cage before the fruits start to ripen. Last year we spent too long crawling about getting caught up in netting. This version is a big improvement!

We rarely grow in pots as nutrients available to plants are limited compared to soil. They’re also a pain to keep hydrated in the summer. We are however doing some tomatoes and cucumbers for the kids. These’ll be in an area we pass by often and we’ll be enriching with manure etc

Young fledgling robin out in the garden being fed by its parents.

Consequence of late season frost last night. New potatoes and achocha have had it. Hopefully spuds will recover. Glasshouse hit 0.0C last night with another frost forecast tonight. Touch and go if the tomatoes etc will pull through. That’s the reality, always a gamble

First strawberry nearly ready to be picked! We have over 300 strawberry plants, with 200 of these under netting. We’re hoping for a decent haul this year.

It’s been a fantastic year for hawthorn blossom! Here’s our ‘home’ hawthorn looking glorious in the sun. The whole tree is alive with life; such a valuable species to have in our system.

And that’s a wrap! We’ve officially finished our asparagus harvest. This was our first full year harvesting after planting the bed. In all we harvested 11.5kg asparagus off 34 plants in 4.5 weeks. We’re tempted to double the number of plants for next year.