2024: April news | Canalside Community Food

Welcome to the inaugural ‘monthly news from the farm’. We’re changing our comms a little bit so that at the end of the month you’ll get a longer piece of writing from your growers instead of snippets in the fortnightly updates. We hope this keeps you more connected to what’s happening in the fields!

April is always an unsettled month of juggling fluctuating conditions. We start to really feel Spring in the air with some relief and gratitude for longer and lighter days and where we literally see plants getting bigger by the day. Until mid-May though we can’t really relax and feel confident that the frosts have passed. Cold nights and hot days mean constant and time consuming monitoring and care for our modules and new plantings.

We’ve finally had some consecutive dry days with some sunshine and mammoth winds which have been great to dry out the land and the fields finally became less of a bog as April continued. Frustratingly, there were still many downpours throughout the month which interrupted the process of mowing, ploughing and prepping the land for planting which ideally would have begun at the start of April.

As I write this I am listening to the hum of the plough across our fields which is music to my ears! By the time you read this the majority of the ploughing needed will have been done and good progress made on the first field plantings. This is a huge relief and moves us out of the limbo we’ve been in.

Anyone who has kept up to date with UK farming news knows it’s a pretty dire situation out there. The UK met office data shows it’s been the wettest 12 months in England on record (bearing in mind records only began in 1836). To give some perspective, the local arable farmers who we contract to do our ploughing have only managed to plant about a tenth of what they normally do. This is all likely going to result in UK wide problems down the line. In many ways we are lucky that as a CSA we farm a variety of crops at various times as well as in our tunnels where we have more control over the conditions, so there is more resilience in that there should always be some crops that do well.

Whilst we waited for the fields we’ve been working hard to do everything else we can so our tunnel crops are well on schedule. We decided to do some inter-cropping in the beds to make up for some of the early crops not planted outside so we’ve planted lettuce, beets and spring onions in amongst summer tunnel crops as an experiment. The courgettes, cucumbers and tomatoes are planted up, as well as extra beds of lettuce in any spare gaps. The tunnel potatoes, carrots, peas and leeks are also all coming along nicely so we are looking forward to harvesting the first of these fresh crops for you asap!

It’s been strange adapting to buying in veg and lessons learnt along the way – not always as simple as it might seem. There is certainly no ‘one stop shop’ if you want both organic and UK produce after this past season. We’re finding the wholesalers variety of produce is dwindling now but this is to be expected as almost all of UK produce is subject to the same hungry gap issues.

We’ve been really happy with the shares this month and it’s been lovely to hear members going away happy. We’ve had lots of lovely Canalside produce to supplement the bought in veg too – including a huge abundance of fresh greens – chard, spinach, spring greens, and salads. The spring glut has well and truly been upon us and we hope you’ve been finding ways to cook and store it all!

Our volunteer mornings have been well attended and we are so appreciative of everyone who lends a hand – so many muddy mornings spent picking carrots in recent months as well as cutting back hedges, turning compost, clearing, weeding and planting in the tunnels and outside this past Saturday. One volunteer commented that they will never moan about the muddy carrots again now they’ve experienced what it’s been like to harvest them this season! This is why we love out members getting connected to the process.

It’s been great to see our newly created ‘infrastructure group’ starting to meet to work on some site developments and we’ve also begun hosting volunteer groups through Warwickshire CAVA where local businesses come for the day to lend a hand and learn what we do here. It’s a great chance to spread the word about our CSA amongst the wider local community and we have more planned in the coming months.

Our newest grower Dan has fitted in well to the team and been a big asset. Dan says: ‘It’s been great getting to meet and work alongside some faces from the membership over the past few weeks. As a new starter to the farm, it’s a joy to receive such a warm welcome, with such a network of knowledge from the local to the global’.

As we look towards May we know there is a lot of work ahead! It’s impossible to say at this point how the delay and the conditions of the past months will affect this season’s crops. There are so many factors at play but we can only hope and pray for good conditions this summer so that most things will have the chance to catch up fine.

Thanks for reading!

The grower team, April 2024