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.