Articles and reports | Canalside Community Food

The highlight of the week was being visited by artist Robin Wang who spent a day doing reportage illustration around the farm as part of her MA project. Check her out on Instagram to see her amazing work. It’s really special to have creative documentation of what we do on the farm and to know that as we were cultivating the food crops she was cultivating these drawings which she plans to use to spread the word about local sustainable food production.

Update 31st August: to view Robin’s finished ‘zine, click here.

Many people have an idealistic mental image of land work, of ruddy-cheeked farmhands chewing a stalk of hay, cheerfully digging carrots against a bucolic backdrop of butterflies fluttering across wildflower meadows.

This week, however, reality came crashing down as the time finally came to dig out the compost toilet. You may be aware that one half of the toilets has been shut for the last six months to allow its contents to decompose and pathogens to die off; consequently much of what we “harvested” was beautiful black gold, well-rotted compost with a pleasant aroma of nutrition and fertility, a far cry from its stinky beginnings, such is the cycle of order and chaos that we call nature.

Organic regulations prohibit the use of this “humanure” in growing, so we got permission to deposit it in an inaccessible corner of a nearby private woodland. Find out more about compost toilets at https://humanurehandbook.com/.

For two successive weekends we have had been battered by wet and windy weather, and many members have expressed concern about the consequences for our infrastructure and crops. Fortunately Canalside has emerged unscathed, with the tunnels and other structures all surviving the wind without a hitch (touch wood!), and most of our field-stored crops seem to be coping well with the repeated deluges. You might think farmers are helpless against the onslaught of brutal storms, but there are many farming practices that can really help mitigate the effect of extreme rainfall that we’ve seen over the last five months, most of which are integral to the organic approach and involve protecting and nourishing healthy soil as your most precious resource.

You may also be interested in this article which describes some of the factors from agricultural practices that contribute to flooding.

Most years we experiment with a new vegetable; sometimes this works a treat (New Zealand spinach) and sometimes not so well (salsify – although it does have a few fans). For 2020 we have 2 new vegetables coming to the farm: huauzontle (pronounced wah-ZONT-lay), also known as Aztec broccoli, is the spinach family’s answer to broccoli – you eat the unopened flower heads; and amaranth, which we did actually sow in 2016 but never got around to planting out, so as they say, if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again… this is leaf amaranth rather than the varieties grown for the quinoa-like seed that you might have seen for sale in wholefood shops.

Dom says, “One of my favourite jobs in the yearly calendar is covering up our carrots with straw to protect them from the worst of the winter frosts. Volunteers and growers tackled this job with relish on Wednesday, rolling some big bales down the field with the usual thrilling risk that some of them might gain momentum and end up in the canal (bales, not volunteers). “

This is the week when we go through the annual ritual of taking the mesh off our purple sprouting broccoli crop (the fabric damages the emerging sprouts) and fix long lines of fishing wire above the plants, to keep the pesky pigeons off. It sounds strange but the technique works a treat (the birds are simply unable to settle on the crop to feed), at a time of year when they can really massacre your brassicas as other food sources dimish.

With Saturday’s Apple Day looming, the Wednesday work morning crew trooped to the orchard with one thing in mind: apples. And their expedition was a surprising success – in a year when most orchards have reported very poor harvests, we were pleased to return with over 600kg in tow, with a further load still on the trees to be picked on the Apple Juicing Day.

Saturday’s Apple Juicing Day was a huge success! The air was filled with gasps of awe from children and adults alike as endless waterfalls of juice oozed from piles of pulp; homemade mashers slammed down into buckets of apples, crushing them ready for the press and at the end of the line thirst was quenched with the sweet juice of our labours. Over 300L of juice was made in a very well attended event – much of this was shared amongst attendees but 50+ bottles have been pasteurised for future events and several barrels of cider are bubbling away as I write! Thanks to all who participated in a cracking day and hopefully we’ll do it all again next year.

This point in the year is always heart wrenching for a grower, as pressure on polytunnel space means we have to commit the ultimate sin: ripping out perfectly healthy tomato plants that are laden with a maturing crop! But every square inch in the tunnels is precious and our overwintering leafy crops need some autumnal warmth and light in order for us to get some pickings in the depth of winter, so the Wednesday team grubbed out one of the two tomato tunnels, weeded and spread compost ready for planting spring greens, kale and oriental leaves.

All the green tomatoes were picked to ripen off the bush, and you’ll be getting these in the share as they redden (over 200kg of them!) along with the tomatoes in tunnel 1, which will stay in until winter.

Now we’ve harvested a decent proportion of our maincrop potatoes, the growers are able to calculate the expected total yield with reasonable accuracy, and we are pleased to report an excellent crop (probably) with approximately 8 tonnes left in the grounds and a year-total of 10 tonnes. Assuming nothing disastrous happens (a dangerous thing to assume!) this should give you a sizeable potato share every week until mid-spring 2020. So we’ll certainly be busy on Potato Day, 14th September, and as always will welcome all comers to lend a hand.

The onions also look good with a crop of around 1500kg.

Canalside featured in the podcast ‘Tales from Five Acre Community Farm’, when Becca and Esther from our sister farm came to Canalside to chat to staff and members. You can listen to it here.

Then later in the same week, a small group of Canalside members paid a visit to Five Acre for a tour with Becca, the grower there.