Sunday, August 14, 2022

A hectic week on the farm

This past week has been one of the craziest weeks on the community farm ever! We are suffering severely from the ongoing heatwave and drought, which is really affecting the quantity and quality of crops that we have now, and will have through the coming winter, so we have been irrigating as much as possible just to keep things alive in the hope of rainfall soon. At the same time, we are having a land drain installed across the top of the Allotment Field, to try to prevent the allotments getting so wet in the winter. The digger doing this work burst our water mains on Tuesday morning, so we had several hours with no water on the farm at all, and we had to take drinking water from our neighbour's kitchen just to keep ourselves hydrated. Tuesday's main task was removing ragwort from the hay meadows - very hot work. 

We have also been renovating the farmhouse kitchen, replacing both the floor and the ceiling, as well as many of the fittings, which resulted in both the power and the internet going down for some of Tuesday afternoon.

And we cut the hay, and brought it all in to the barn, one of the biggest itchiest sweatiest most-stressful jobs of the year - but we got it done (more on this later).

And St. Just Market began again, the first one since March 2020 (in the W.I. Hall from 09:30 till 12:30 every Saturday from now on), meaning more harvesting and packing and logistics, added to Sennen Market every Tuesday.

And two of our shop volunteers couldn't make it this week, and our two volunteer delivery drivers were both away, so well done and many thanks to Polly and Holly for stepping in to deliver 70 veg boxes between them as far afield as St. Ives and Ludgvan, on routes they'd never driven before.

Add to this our production of 90 veg-boxes all of our own vegetables, keeping the farm shop stocked daily, looking after 350 free-range hens, and it has been quite a week.....

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