Tag Archives: OPen Farm Sunday

End of the week

It’s 4.30pm on Saturday (though I won’t be posting until later), or 1995 if you follow the other form of dating I’ve been using. In 1995 I’m married with kids, happy and couldn’t tell you what was happening in the outside world because I didn’t have time to notice.

Wikipedia tells me that John Major called a leadership election to confirm his leadership of the party. I mention this only because it gives me chance for a John Major anecdote. I met him once and was introduced. About an hour later I met him again and he remembered my name. There was no need for him to have done that and it struck me that a man who could remember names like that, and appear to be pleased to meet you for a second time, would probably rise high in politics. He did.

There’s probably room for a whole digression on leadership and what it takes to succeed in politics here, but it wouldn’t be as interesting as cookery and gardening. I wish I’d realised that years ago.

Here are some pictures of a Wild greens quiche with guinea fowl eggs. My wife is making me describe weeds as wild greens now. Some years ago we went through a similar process with a product I now call “manure”.

It’s onions, blanched nettles and fat hen in a ready made pastry case. After adding the eggs and milk I dropped torn up chive blossom, calendula petals and whole borage flowers to the top. I will have to work on preserving the colour of the petals.

The water I blanched the nettles in took on a lovely green colour after just a minute or two of steeping and after removing the leaves I drank it. Much nicer than the cup I made earlier in the week, and much fresher tasting, though it did have overtones of calabrese. Compared with overtones of fox I’ll go for that. With hindsight I should have strained the insect shaped bits out of it, but I’m not a vegetarian so no harm done.

We have another school next week, a planning session, part one of my takeover of the catering side and I’m going to do some cuttings with willow water. The comfrey plant food is decidedly murky now – you wouldn’t want to swim in a pond that colour- and the indoor salads are really getting a move on now, in contrast to the disappointing outdoor salads.

Finally, after seeing my display of Wild Salad at the Open Farm Sunday I’ve been asked if I can do one at a buffet in a few weeks time. My weedy fame is spreading!

Open Farm Sunday 2015

3 Replies

Sorry I’ve been away – we’ve been getting home late, eating, sleeping and stating again to prepare for Open Farm Sunday. In the end, despite the weather, the tent collapse and various other minor troubles, it all worked out well. That shouldn’t be a surprise because things normally do work out well.

In the end we had great weather, plenty of people and two proposals for the farmer. One was from a lady in the Kenya group who proposed during the barn dance and one was from a lady at the Question and Answer session, though she was asking on behalf of her mother. I don’t know what they see in him, though if anyone had been able to put their hands on two cows at the barn dance the whole weekend might have taken on a different aspect.

Due to TB regulations we weren’t able to have cows visiting for the weekend, so we will never know what might have happened.

The scarecrow contest attracted some fine examples and the spoon scarecrow competition managed over 70 entries this year. A lot of people made leaf masks from Woodland Trust print-outs, while others explored the tree that Bea made ( good old Shipshape Arts!) and a number of others ate garden weeds. We also had information from Open Farm Sunday, Kellogg, Frontier and the Home-grown Cereals Authority. All in all it was a good team effort.

I’ll leave you with some photographs for now as I have to get on with some work instead of enjoying myself blogging.

72 hours

1 Reply

In theory I have 114 hours left before we begin Open Farm Sunday. However, as I need to sleep, eat, cook, shop, collect one of the kids from Sheffield and break off to answer queries from members of the public and farm staff it’s likely that I have only 72 hours, or even less, to produce a stunningly informative display on modern farming. I have a broken printer and a laminator that regularly pleats the paper and things are not looking good.

To add to my general feeling of forthcoming disaster we’ve just had a meeting (and you know what I feel about them) and we’re now doing the Health and Safety stuff. That’s like a meeting but with the additional point that plants become hazards (poison and thorns), animals can give you nasty diseases and even the ground we walk on can leap up and break your ankle. It’s a dangerous old world out there. I hate to think what it would be like if we ever reintroduced wild boar or bears.

You may of course be asking yourself why I’m writing this instead of getting on with work, but the question contains it’s own answer. Most things are better than work, and blogging certainly beats typing up notes on growing wheat. If you ploughed up Wembley Stadium, which wouldn’t be a bad thing in my opinion, you could grow enough wheat to make a sandwich for every member of a capacity crowd. The only problem there is that if you grew wheat on the field you wouldn’t get a capacity crowd. Nobody has spotted that so far.

Now, this is possibly an interesting fact when you first hear it, but I’ve heard it more than once now. I’ve also told them that one of our fields will produce wheat to make two pancakes for every inhabitant of Nottingham and made various other calculations based on the towns and schools that people come from. Using information off the internet I even calculated that the woodland we are planting would absorb the emissions from several thousand cars.

Yes, I did say “using information off the internet”. Some of you will have spotted the flaw there. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. I repeated an error found in several internet articles and produced a calculation that suggested we could solve the problem of global warming by all planting window boxes. This sounded a bit extreme so I did more research.

It seems I was wrong by a factor of several thousand.

I now have 71 hours left and Tim has just come in to tell me that one of the tents has broken in the wind, specifically the tent I’m supposed to be using at the weekend. Will be back later to put photos on.

Later: one pole is bent and another went through the roof of the tent. It’s fixable but we really could have done without spending the time on it.

Meanwhile the runner beans are suffering in the wind. I’ll try to save what I can but I’m going to plant replacements in the polytunnel tonight – fortunately I have toilet roll tubes in the back of the car.

That’s probably the oddest closing sentence I’ve ever used.

Nettle Preservation Society

4 Replies

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

Edward Thomas

It sometimes seems that there’s only a handful of people who actually like nettles, and I only like them because I can threaten people with nettle soup when they visit the farm.

Since I started cooking with nettles they have even ruined Edward Thomas’s poem for me – I don’t want TALL nettles, I want small tender ones.

My crop has been under threat for the last two weeks. Last week our Community Payback team, who are usually not industrious enough to do too much damage, were let loose with a strimmer. The nettle patch in the allotment (which I keep for butterfly food despite the folly of breeding butterflies next to brassicas) was comprehensively flattened and they also managed to trim a couple of inches off the tops of last year’s fig cuttings.

I would actually like to take the time to give them some horticultural training but the sort of questions they asked last time we tried it indicate that they will only use the knowledge to get into more trouble, if you know what I mean.

Fortunately I have secret caches of nettles…

The second Great Destruction occurred yesterday when the farmer, in pursuit of a tidy farm for Open Farm Sunday, started cutting grass. Next thing I knew there was the noise of a mower behind the polytunnels and the nettles I’d been carefully concealing from view (I thought) lay dead. I’m tempted to get lyrical about them, brought low in their prime by man and stinking machine, but what is done is done. They are in the compost heap now. “Dead, dead, and never called me mother!” as they say. I had to look that up because although I knew the phrase I didn’t know where it came from.

Plan B is now in action – nettle soup on Tuesday will be made from my remaining plants – picked now and blanched in advance before any more destruction occurs, and the Open Farm Sunday soup samples will be made in advance from my nettles at home.

Did I mention Open Farm Sunday – 7th June? We’ll be in the Education Tent.

Raffles and old friends

2 Replies

Mix of work today, I’ve hoed the beds, mooched tea and biscuits from the yoga group and visted two companies who are giving us raffle and tombola prizes.

This last can be quite hectic as these days they all seem to want photo ID before you can pick things up. For a man with no passport and an old style driving licence this can be quite a strain. Fortunately Julia has a passport. I had one once, but after my last trip abroad, which featured being caught in a riot, threatened with arrest and sitting in a car when the door fell off…

Well, you can see why I decided not to go abroad again.

Newark was great in the sunshine and I got to catch up with an old mate. We’ve known each other a long time – I didn’t have kids in those days and he didn’t have a bypass. Would have liked to have made time for the English Civil War Centre but there wasn’t time today.

Newark in sunshine

Before closing I’d just like to say thanks to Boots, Morrisons, Asda and Wilkinsons for their support with raffle and tombola prizes for Open Farm Sunday. After a number of refusals and a few people who didn’t even reply it’s nice to know that some people will still support small local events.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm