Advent fair.

Today's "advent fair" on the farm was well-attended, thoroughly enjoyable, and ran as smoothly as clockwork (thanks to our team of volunteers and supporters who worked tirelessly to make it so).

Advent fair afternoon agenda.

Alice running our cafe in the packing shed - hot soup, freshly baked bread, hot drinks, mulled orange juice, cakes and mince pies.

A busy farmyard.

Craft workshops in the Hive - edible wreathes, mini Christmas puddings, and salt-dough tree decorations.

An edible wreath.

Our farm shop and sample hamper.

Enjoying the fire-pit in the farmyard.

We unveiled our proposed development plan for the farm, particularly the outbuildings.

Advent Fair this Sunday 12-4pm

Latest Cornishman article.

Christmas hampers.

Prototype Christmas hamper - actual contents may vary!

Please come to the farm shop and see our example Christmas hamper on display - full of lovely food and only £35. The actual contents will vary as we will be taking delivery of special Christmas chutneys and other produce nearer the time. Hampers need to be booked in advance, and can be collected from the farm on the 22nd and 23rd December. We look forward to hearing from you!

Harvesting potatoes.

So far this year all our potatoes have been dug by hand, but in early November we took possession of a single-row potato lifter, which has speeded our work somewhat! The current dry spell has allowed us to lift more than a tonne of potatoes so far, with more to come.

Tractor and lifter in the field.

A crate of freshly unearthed Valor potatoes.

Romain, Dominic and Boris picking up potatoes last Saturday.

Lifting potatoes has inspired one of our local volunteers to produce some artwork based on her experience - click this link to see her amazing drawing http://milliewilkins.com/category/journal-2/

Romain

Many thanks to Romain, from France, who left the farm on Monday after one week volunteering as a WWOOFer - we wish you all the best on your onward WWOOFing travels in the UK.

Romain picking up potatoes in the maincrop field.

Energyfund Cornwall Award.

Bosavern Community Farm Wins 'Energyfund Cornwall' Award!

On Monday 10th November, Pete (Grower), Nikki (Full time Volunteer) and Rob (our in house Renewables Expert) went to Energyfund Cornwall awards after being shortlisted for an award. The ceremony was hosted by Lucy Siegle, 'Green Agony Aunt' from the Guardian at The Eden Project.
Of the 23 applications for the £300,000 Energyfund Cornwall fund, 4 got partial funding and 15 were fully funded.

We are very happy to announce that the farm has been awarded a £10,800 grant!
This will be used for the initial costs associated with developing renewables at BCF and possibly a Community Share Issue launch to fund the installation costs. The bulk of the money is to pay for planning application fees and the environmental reports needed to go with them. Just over a quarter of the money will be used for running a CSI to raise the funds to pay for the systems work - but now at least we can move on with this without any financial risk to the farm. This is a very important step in helping the farm become more self-sustaining and to be a model of best practice in sustainable food growing initiatives.

Additional congratulations to Rob for recieving an award for his second venture of developing
a solar PV project through West Cornwall Community Renewables, (like Bosavern is a Community Benefit Society). This will fund Rob to kick start WCCR, developing local community owned renewable generation.

Well done Rob and thanks for running our application!
Thanks to all who supported our Crowdfunding application and please continue to support us in this exciting venture!

Onions stored for winter.

2014 saw our largest harvest yet of the biggest onions yet, which we were able to dry in the field then polytunnel due to late summer sunshine. They are now all sorted and stored in the packing shed, hung from the beams in string sacks, and should see us through the winter and spring.

Some of our onions - "sturon" and "red baron" stored for winter.

Picking and packing volunteers.

Friday 14th November saw our biggest volunteer turn-out yet for picking produce and packing veg boxes, and once again we'd like to thank all our wonderful volunteers for making the community farm possible and worthwhile.

Alice, Martin, Jenny, Willow, Janie, Nikki, Tigerlily, Pete, Darren, Dominic, Boris and Mark.

With their help we were able to pick and pack for 30 weekly veg boxes, plus our wholesale orders for local businesses (cafes and pubs), Pendeen farmer's market, and our own farm shop, by midday, which gave us the afternoon to tick some more jobs off in the market garden and polytunnels - thanks again!

Darren.

Everybody at the farm would like to thank Darren, from Sheffield, for his hard work as a volunteer over the past month, and wish him all the best for his potential permaculture project in Spain.

Darren and Boss processing red onions in the packing shed.

Paulo

Many thanks to Paulo, from Brazil, who spent one month volunteering on the farm - good luck with the rest of your UK travels and fact-finding missions.

Paulo piling rubble during our autumn tidy-up.

Squash harvest.

This year we had two squash patches, the second of which was an experimental bed to see which of five varieties would yield best under the same conditions.

Jack-be-littles in the squash patch.

Crown princes in the squash patch.

On Thursday 30th October we harvested all that were there and weighed them - the yield of five plants of each of the five varieties, in a 25 square metre bed:-
crown prince - 27.8kg
jack-be-little - 18.5kg
rolet - 16.5kg
butternut - 6.6kg
turk's turban - 3.5kg.

The relative harvests of our five varieties - crown prince (back left), turk's turban (back centre), butternut (back right), jack-be-little (front left) and rolet (front right).

Consequently we won't be growing turk's turban again, though the butternut may be worth another go if we think we can spare some polytunnel space for them next year. We have grown jack-be-little for the past 4 years and will continue to do so; we will include rolet in our veg boxes sometime this month and we welcome feedback on their flavour and cooking performance; and the crown prince is a winner, though we must remember that those 27.8kg of squash corresponded to nine individual vegetables.

Crown prince, turk's turban, and summer crook-necked displayed in our farm shop.