News From the Field | Canalside Community Food - Part 2

It’s been very heartening in the last couple of weeks to be harvesting an abundance of fresh greens again alongside seeing our polytunnels bursting to life. There’s nothing quite like the green of new growth to lift the spirits and we’re now into our spring glut which is always a welcome addition to the root vegetables that have seen us so well through the winter.

We bring you as many greens as are possible to grow locally and seasonally during the winter, thanks to a good crop rotation and our polytunnels. We overwinter certain plants like spring greens, kale, salads, spinach, spring onions, chard and more which means they get planted in the autumn, grow slowly over winter where we harvest occasionally but as soon as there is more light and heat we can get them in the share more abundantly. As we’ve been banging on about for months, there were crops that really suffered this year – brassica greens that would normally supplement the roots all winter like oriental salads, cauliflowers, purple sprouting broccoli and cabbages were massacred in the frosts so we have been working hard to eke out what we can. I don’t think we’ve actually had one week all winter where there’s been nothing green in the share which is to be celebrated more than ever this season. We were so happy to get some caulis and cabbages to everyone despite them being on the small size, and now our later variety of PSB is finally harvestable.

And in celebrating the greens, I also want to give a shout out to the roots that have seen us through the winter so well. I’ve noticed how easy it is to bemoan our root veg as we have become so accustomed in our culture to having whatever we want whenever we want. There would have been a time when the root veg was all that was available during the winter. For the winter share and beyond we always grow potatoes, carrots, parsnips, swedes, squash, celeriac, red and golden beetroot and jerusalem artichokes alongside a steady supply of alliums, which when you list it all together it’s actually quite diverse and nutritionally rich.  

So all that being said, we hope you enjoy the last weeks of these roots, alongside the abundance of the spring glut!

Eleanor, on behalf of the growers

Beetroot (both golden and purple/red) have been in a share regularly over recent weeks as we had a good harvest last year. They are a staple of our winter shares since we can store them well in damp sand ‘clamps’ through the winter and into the spring. Here are a few ideas for how to use them if you’re finding it difficult to get through the quantities in the share:

Beet kvass – fermented beets
Fermenting is a great way to increase the nutritional value of a food by introducing ‘friendly’ bacteria that help give a diverse microbiome in the gut when they are eaten. It also helps to extend the shelf life of food and spread useable period across a longer stretch of time, as you can be eating the food fresh while a batch is fermenting and then eat the fermented foods after that.

Here’s a link to the recipe I’ve been using for several years. It produces tangy cubes of beet and a thick liquid you can drink as a tonic or use in a number of other ways suggested in the recipe. If it develops a white scum on the surface, just mix it in. Use something to keep the beets below the surface, eg. a jam jar that fits exactly inside your fermenting container (a larger jar in my case), and this will prevent lumps of mould forming.

Beet soup aka borscht (this is an adaptation of the recipe in my old and well used copy of the Cranks recipe book)
Chop an onion and fry it until it’s beginning to soften. Add c. 450g beetroot cubed, a medium potato also cubed, a stock cube or a teaspoonful or so of yeast extract, a bay leaf and water to cover. You can also increase the nutritional value by adding red lentils, maybe 100-150g and increasing the water. When everything is cooked (though the beets might still be quite firm), remove the bay leaf and blend until smooth. Add some ground nutmeg (not too much as it’s strong), freshly ground black pepper and cider vinegar (or whatever vinegar you’ve got would probably be fine) – c. 1-2tbsp, to taste – it gives the soup a little bit of a sour edge. If you’ve got liquid from your beet kvass to use, you could add this once it’s off the heat – cooking it will kill all those lovely bacteria I mentioned above. Serve with a dollop of sour cream/crème fraiche/natural yoghurt and a sprinkle of parsley if you have some. According to the toddler in the house, the yoghurt is the main feature and she will devour quite a bit from eating the thin layer yoghurt that sits above it! (Sneaky mama trick!)

Other ideas:
Juiced – you could use a blender, some water and a piece of muslin if you don’t have a fancy juicer
Grated into a winter slaw
Roasted in chunks, with olive oil (add slivers of orange zest and a squeeze of fresh orange juice for extra zazoom)
Thinly sliced and crisped in the oven to make beetroot crisps
In brownies/cakes

Ideas from Ali and the grower team

It’s been an eventful month on the farm and we wanted to keep our members in the loop. We were lucky that the ten days of heavy frosts thawed just in time to harvest the Christmas share but the jump from mild to prolonged sub zero and back again did wreak some havoc on the crops.

It’s been hard to tell the longer term effects but we did have some clear casualties: the broad beans, outdoor salad and chard were killed and other crops damaged like some brassicas and carrots. Even some of our storage crops were affected. They are not lost but the worry is they won’t last as long as normal and are now not as healthy.

We are closely monitoring all of this and will decide on a course of action if needed. It may be that our annual harvesting gap in May and early June is more pronounced than usual. Some things we don’t yet know and it depends on how well the plants recover – it is always surprising how much renewal is possible. The kale in the fields bounced back well from the heavy frosts in December and there are also over wintering greens coming on nicely in the tunnels and the remaining parsnips are coming off the field looking good.

We don’t want to worry members, but give an honest picture of where we’re at and why the veg is as it is. Some of the crops, like the potatoes haven’t been too good because of summer drought conditions, and it’s quite heartbreaking to know that other plants we tended through that drought then succumbed to frosts. It’s not just Canalside but also many other farms that have been affected. This is where our CSA model hopefully comes into its own – sharing the risks and the rewards together. We’re doing our very best to get you as much good veg as we possibly can!

Farmers managing weather is a story as old as time, and, some of these are new challenges facing us. There are lessons to be learnt and strategies to be put in place e.g. better irrigation for droughts, different storage or protection measures for ongoing heavy frosts.

We’re currently working hard to get the new growing season underway without a hitch so we can plant new crops from late January onwards, according to our crop plans. We’re re-skinning our damaged polytunnel, building new hotbeds ready for propagation and fixing fences. Our volunteers have been working hard and we are determined to meet the challenges. Here’s praying for a more stabilised season ahead!

In hope,
Eleanor, Stephen and Lena
The growing team.

We’ve now weighed in our onion and garlic harvests which have been a great success. Over 100kilos of cured garlic bulbs and 1.7 tonnes of onions which will see us through the coming months. This is a much better yield than last year and on par with the year before that. A lot of work went into making sure the onions were irrigated well during the drought earlier in the year so we are pleased this paid off in the end.

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.

This week we’ve been getting very sweaty on the farm – as well as staff and volunteers boiling, it’s even been to hot for our bountiful garlic crop which had been curing in a tunnel: in these high temperatures (been getting up to 40 degrees C) there’s a risk they start to turn translucent and cook as happened a few years back. So now they’re curing in the pole barn instead.

Thankfully, we’ve finished planting most of the next round of tunnel crops, with fennel, chillies, New Zealand spinach and basil taking over from potatoes, carrots and leeks.

We’re praying that the rain, which is due at the weekend, will be enough to saturate the fields as we are currently spending a lot of time irrigating the crops.

It’s been lovely to work in the sunshine this week and it has certainly given the crop growth a good surge. Here’s hoping for showers to balance it out and make our field irrigation easier.

As you’ll see when you collect your share, we have really entered the ‘harvesting gap’ (aka ‘hungry gap’) – our stored crops have done us well until now but potatoes, beets, celeriac and squash are all but over, as are our winter field crops like carrots, parsnips and leeks.

The new carrots and potatoes are looking great, but because of the unusually cold spring could be another month until harvest. In fact a lot of things on the farm are about a month delayed which is a very different story to last year when we had such a warm spring. Looking back at the last few years’ records, there is a huge disparity in the share right now: strawberries, courgettes and cucumbers were already being harvested this time last year, much to our chagrin.

This week the steering group finally got to meet for the first time since last June. We enjoyed a farm tour together led by Stephen before our monthly meeting to uphold the vision and development of Canalside – it was great to meet face to face outside after many months on zoom!

May is feeling more like April with sunshine and showers so we’ve been able to make some progress in the fields. And with the increase in warmth we’ve seen some real growth in the plants, especially in the tunnels – even the most raggedy looking tomatoes are now filling out.

But to be honest, the most exciting news of the week is the arrival of our new trolley – after years of keeping homemade equipment going we decided to make small investments around the farm that will make things run smoother. We can now easily transport plants and harvested crops around the site without the wheels falling off!

Eleanor, on behalf of the growing team

Photos: Tom Ingall

April has been a tough month for growers across the UK. High pressure has meant weeks with no rain – only 5mm had fallen until the rain came on Tuesday night. To put this into context, the driest April on record was 7.1mm back in 1938 and the average April rainfall in England over the last 4 yeas has been 28mm (2020), 35.4mm, 78.4mm and a very dry 2017 at 17.6mm.

It’s very unusual to have to irrigate bare land just to cultivate (prepare the land by ploughing, power harrowing etc) – let alone for establishing the first cultivations of the season – but this is what we’ve been doing the past couple of weeks. In very dry weather irrigation hoses are left to run on timers overnight but because there have also been a record number of frosts this month this wasn’t possible. A lot of time has been spent on this, as well as time each day covering and uncovering crops for protection from both the night’s frost and the heat in the day – an unusual combination.

As a consequence we are behind on many of our field plantings which have already been growing slowly because of the cold nights, and wouldn’t have survived planting out in the dry ground in these conditions. This also has a knock on for new sowings as we simply have no space in the hotbeds for them whilst the field crops are still there. This may well result in the hunger gap bei

It’s all a juggling act and has been a challenging few weeks for the team. Speaking to other growers we realise there is very little we can do other than pray the rain continues (but not too much!), the frosty nights come to an end and everything catches up. As always it is humbling to know we are really at the mercy of mother nature, who will always have the last word.

We decided to split our ploughing this year into two bulk lots to make it easier for the growers; an early and a late plough. Thanks to the recent dry weather we reached a major milestone for the new season this week having ploughed over half of the land, ready to prepare it for planting.

We hope you enjoyed the first of the over wintering cauliflowers this week. Cauli’s are notoriously hard to harvest – there is a very small window to catch them between being under or over ripe so Stephen had a very happy surprise to find 180 plants perfectly ready on Monday.