Today's veg boxes

 

Today we have delivered (or had collected) 78 veg boxes, thanks to Chris and Richard, our two volunteer delivery drivers. The boxes contained:-

Small box (£9.50) - purple sprouting broccoli (Cargease Organics), carrots (UK organic), a cauliflower (Cargease Organics), potatoes, a bunch of icicle radishes, and mixed salad leaves.

Standard box (£14.50) - carrots (UK organic), a cauliflower (Cargease Organics), chard, oriental greens, mixed herbs, parsnips (UK organic), potatoes, a bunch of icicle radishes, rhubarb, and mixed salad leaves.

To sign up for one of our not-for-profit veg boxes please fill out an online form at www.bosaverncommunityfarm.org.uk/veg-boxes/

Cargease Organics.

 

Our good friend, Franics Sampson, of Cargease Organics near Cockwells and Crowlas, is semi-retiring, and will no longer be growing organic veg to sell. Francis is one of the UK's leading organic field-scale growers, and many box schemes in Cornwall and across the country have relied on his veg to fill their boxes each winter. We have been buying Francis' veg since we opened our first farm shop in 2013, and over the years his cauliflowers in particular have been staples in our veg boxes in the winter (along with his purple sprouting broccoli, swedes, cabbages, leeks, and Brussels sprouts, and there have also been potatoes, carrots, beetroot, and celeriac at times). We have his caulis and PSB in the boxes this week, and that will be the end...

We wish Francis a very happy semi-retirement - after 50 years of picking caulis his back deserves a rest! A huge thanks to him and his team for all the wonderful local organic veg over the past eleven years!

More recent WWOOF volunteers

 

Thibault.

Tom.

Nim.

Jojo.

Amber.

Spring Open Day

Yesterday was our spring open day, with the main theme being "getting yourself ready for the growing season".... Despite the waterlogged fields preventing any car-parking at the farm itself, lots of people made the journey down from St. Just on foot, so the day was well-attended and a great success.

Our pop-up cafe in the farmyard - tea, coffee, cakes, soup, chilli, homity pies, green salad, coleslaw etc...

Cheese and olive stall.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust information stall.

Jam and preserves stall.

Joe with his foot-powered treadle lathe for green woodworking.

Kate on the farm's wildflower plants stall, with Marie on the National Trust information stall behind.

Lunchtime in the farmyard.

Nick's carved wooden spoons.

Andy with his upcycled planters and garden plants.

Plate garden workshop.

Sustrans and their bicycle repair shop.

Terry talking trees as part of the one-hour farm tour (centred on the market garden).

Tom with his scything demonstration (there will be a full day workshop later in the year).

Victor's tool-sharpening station (Oliver had another tool sharpening station in our workshop).

There was plenty of other stuff happening too (raffle, seed swap, farm shop etc..) but this is what I managed to photograph on the day. A HUGE thank you to all our volunteers who made the day such a success!

Recent WWOOFers

Many thanks to our volunteers from World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms who come from all over the world to further their knowledge of regenerative agriculture here at Bosavern Community Farm. The following three WWOOFers have all left recently having come to the ends of their stays with us.

Ana, helping to clean out the chicken sheds last Wednesday afternoon.

Jamie, digging out nettle roots before planting onion sets, on the market garden.

Laura (on the right) with Jojo (who is still here), harvesting nettles in Home Field.

True Foxes

One of our favourite bands filmed the video for their latest song "Higher" here on the community farm last month - please watch it by clicking on the link below.

https://youtu.be/cOtuSpabfdg?list=RDcOtuSpabfdg

You can also reach this video via their own website and scrolling down to Higher.

https://truefoxesmusic.co.uk/

St. Pirran's Day gold award

 

Our lovely shop window display for St. Pirran's Day (see earlier post) won gold award for a small window!!! Well done to the artistic team who created the display.

Tomorrow's veg boxes

Watercress harvest in Valentine polytunnel.

We have almost finished packing tomorrow's 83 veg boxes and 3 restaurant orders. Tomorrow morning we need to pick and pack 10kg of salad leaves and then we can deliver them all. They will contain:-

standard veg box (£13.50) - 1.5kg potatoes, a cauliflower, a white cabbage, watercress, salad leaves, 2 dried chillies, a wet elephant garlic, mixed herbs, and kale;

small veg box (£8.50) - 1kg potatoes, a cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, 2 dried chillies, watercress, and salad leaves.

Please sign up to our not-for-profit veg box scheme by completing the on-line form on our website, many thanks.

St. Pirran's shop window display

As part of St. Pirran's day on 5th March (next Tuesday) a group of farm volunteers have lovingly created a beautiful window display for our farm shop. Many thanks to our wonderful volunteers! Please come to the shop and admire their handiwork.

Stocking the farm shop

This week we took delivery of a big order from Suma, and we have also been stocking up on local supplies, plus of course our own eggs, so our farm shop is looking lovely. We are open Monday to Saturday from 10am till 5pm, closed on Sundays.

Recent WWOOF volunteers

Many many thanks to all the WWOOF volunteers whom we have hosted in February - Baptiste, Freddie, Will, Grace, Ruby, Gina, and Warren - who have already moved on to their next projects and destinations.

Baptiste harvesting coriander in Valentine polytunnel.

Freddie harvesting Brussels sprouts on the market garden in January.

Warren harvesting squash last October.

Veg box 23/2/24

One of our standard veg boxes last week.

Our first purple sprouting broccoli pick of the year last Thursday.

Last week our veg boxes contained:-

Standard box (£13.50) - purple sprouting broccoli (our first pick of the year!), a savoy cabbage, a cauliflower, 3 dried chillies, oriental greens, kale, potatoes, a bunch of radishes, salad leaves, and watercress.

Small box (£8.50) - a cauliflower, 3 dried chillies, kale, potatoes, salad leaves, and watercress.

Veg boxes can now be ordered online via our website:-

www.bosaverncommunityfarm.org.uk/veg-boxes/

Veg boxes 2/2/24

We have just been out in the field digging up our potatoes for this week's veg boxes. This week we are planning to include the following:-

£8.50 box - carrots, a cauliflower, rainbow chard, spring greens, potatoes, and salad leaves.

£13.50 box - golden beetroot, a savoy cabbage, carrots, a portion of celeriac, oriental greens, spring greens, potatoes, salad leaves, and watercress.

The rainbow chard, potatoes, salad leaves, oriental greens, and watercress are grown here on the community farm. The cauliflowers, savoy cabbages, and spring greens are grown at Cargease Organics near Crowlas. The carrots, golden beetroot, and celeriacs have been grown on organic farms in the UK.

vegbox.bcf@bcents.org.uk

Eggs aplenty

After quite a hard winter, our chickens have started to lay well again already, and are now producing about 120 eggs per day between them, so we have plenty of eggs for sale in the farm shop. Our eggs are priced at £2.30 per half dozen. Our chicken flock has a one-hectare field to range in, and we feed them on GM-free soya-free layers pellets. Our farm shop is open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 till 17:00. Our eggs are also available at Sennen Farmers Market (Tuesdays 09:30 till 12:30) and in our weekly veg boxes.

Tamar Organics seeds for sale in our farm shop

Tamar Organics is the seed company from whom we buy most of the seeds that we use here on Bosavern Community Farm. For the past few years we have stocked seed packets in our farm shop from the Seed Cooperative in Lincolnshire, because they were a community owned cooperative, but sadly they are no more. So we have turned to Tamar, a Cornish organic seed company, whose seeds we find to consistently be some of the best, and we now have a wide range of their seeds in our shop instead.

Our farm shop is open from 10am till 5pm six days per week (closed on Sundays). We also stock professional-standard peat-free potting compost at £11.45 per sack, and seed trays made from recycled plastic.

Emma and Saffron

Emma, from Paris, and Saffron, from Bristol, both left the farm last week to move on to new projects, having stayed with us as WWOOFers for several weeks. We would like to send them both our thanks and best wishes and we hope to see them again in the future.

Emma cutting down herb fennel to encourage new growth, inside the Mothership polytunnel.

Saffron helping to plant rhubarb in the perennial section of our market garden.

The calm after the storm(s)

 

It has been a lovely calm mild day, after the storms of Isha and Joceleyn in the past few days - here is the sunrise behind Bartinney Beacon as seen from our chicken field this morning.

The first spring flowers of 2024

Although it is way too early to talk about spring, we have spotted the first celendine and butterburs in flower on the farm...

Planting rhubarb

Every year in February we sow a packet of rhubarb seeds then grow the seedlings on into small pot plants. Almost one year later, when the red buds of the new plants are beginning to show at the end of winter, we plant them into our expanding rhubarb patch (we have just done this today, adding more than 70 new plants to the patch). This is a much cheaper method than buying crowns (or small slices of crowns) from seed companies, or buying the plants themselves, but there is a delay of over two years before we get a crop. We have been doing this for several years now, so there are plenty of plants in production, plus the new batch annually, and we also replace any dead plants whilst we are at it. Rhubarb is such a wonderful hungry-gap-filler!

This was an onion patch last year. We covered it in black plastic for the winter, then removed the plastic a few weeks ago, dug out any surviving weeds and perennial roots, then planted the small rhubarbs on a one-metre grid, after a little broadforking / loosening where the plants were about to go. Each plant is marked with a cane so that we don't lose them.

More snow

We had a sprinkling of snow on Thursday last week, first thing in the morning, which made harvesting for veg boxes even more difficult! But we managed to fill 71 boxes with fresh veg by midday Friday (although Friday morning's salad pick had to be delayed by two hours to allow the leaves to thaw, even though they were in the polytunnels).

Last week's standard veg boxes contained beetroot, a red cabbage, a savoy cabbage, rainbow chard, spring greens, mixed herbs, curly kale, potatoes, salad leaves, and Brussels sprouts.

Last week's small boxes contained beetroot, a savoy cabbage, rainbow chard, curly kale, potatoes, and salad leaves.