2024: October news | Canalside Community Food

Samhain is upon us, marking the end of the traditional harvest season and the beginning of winter. The word “Samhain” is derived from old Irish and means “summer’s end.” In the Celtic calendar the start of November is also the start of the year, beginning when everything around us is in nature is dying. The plants and trees drop their seeds and the new year is sown into the compost of the old, laying dormant until Spring.

As we now move into our Winter hours at the start of November it has also meant saying goodbye to Dan, our seasonal grower, who has been supporting our work at the farm through the busy summer season. We are very thankful for his hard work and all his contributions during his time here at Canalside and wish him well for his journey ahead.

As we are not a traditional farm and instead provide our members with produce all year round we still have plenty of work to pack into our days, but less days are worked and there is much planning to be done so we are grateful for the shift out of the intensity of the summer season.

Change always comes in small ways in the Autumn. The annual ‘switch off’ of the staff fridge in the pole barn and the electric kettle (which is extra low in energy use to guarantee that our off grid solar systems can cope) and the switch to heating water with gas means we save our precious sun energy for charging floodlights to help our members navigate their way to collect their veg on the dark Tuesday evenings. The daylight hours are noticeably shorter, and more importantly for growing, the chances for sunlight dwindle exponentially.

Another end of an era has been the tearing down of our completely disintegrated tool shed, which was in such bad shape that we are not even really missing it! This has been part of the work on improving the drainage around the barn. Big thanks to both Paul and Craig who have done a lot of work on this to get it to a stage where we hope to avoid having the barn flooded all winter.

The biggest work of the last month has been a lot of our main crop harvesting. Much gratitude to all our volunteers who have been helping with this. A couple of very early frosts killed off the squash and pumpkin foliage and we had to bring them in about 3-4 weeks earlier than usual. Not only did the plants die back early, but frosts can also impact the longevity of squash in storage. We got them in within 2 days of work and stored them safely, also providing the first pumpkin share of the year in the run-up to Halloween/Samhain.

The apple harvest is ongoing, about half the crop has been brought in and by the time you read this the later varieties should all have been picked. These will be stored and integrated into your veg share over the next few months. We enjoyed the fabulous apple pressing day in mid October with the start of apple picking and lots of juice making.

The share has been a real array of autumn colours; leafy greens are still a big part of the share with some huge pak choi, beautiful chard and we had a lovely couple of shares of tasty sweetcorn (which are not getting enough sunlight hours in Britain and often struggle with growth here). We had some surprise cauliflowers which came up a lot earlier than expected and made a great addition to the share for a few weeks, and we particularly enjoy the amazing purple turnips. It’s been another strong year for tomatoes which have been abundant all the way through the summer until now.

We have begun buying in a little supplementary veg this week, all organic and grown in the UK, to make sure that we do not deplete our existing crops too quickly too and early on so we protect against a large harvesting gap next year. We hope you enjoy the carrots and onions in addition to the array of veg we were able to grow here on site.

The last of our main crop harvests to be done in the coming weeks are beetroot and celeriac so do come and join us when these volunteer sessions are advertised.

The growers, October 2024