Summer Newsletter

Welcome to our summer newsletter! We will be providing you with the latest updates from the farm and market garden.

Market garden update from Liz

What an exciting time of year! After months of planning, seed sowing and careful nurturing of seedlings, harvests are beginning and veg boxes are ready once again! Last week I harvested the first boxes of the season. It felt really rewarding to finally be pulling food from the ground after months of preparation. Chatting to customers again made the week even better. It was lovely to be reunited with some of you who were eating our veg last year, as well as meeting some new people too – welcome! Hearing all about your recipes and why you think this project is important really reminds me why we are doing all this, so thank you.

Cucumbers are nearly ready!

Some of the conversations this week have got me thinking about how to make eating veg easier. Lots of us are short on time and don’t always manage to cook from scratch, despite wanting to. Often we reach for something convenient, maybe after a long day at work or during a busy time of our lives. Other times we just get stuck in a cooking rut and feel a bit bored eating the same meals on repeat. I think over time, we have collectively also lost some cooking skills and knowledge, which only makes it tricker for us to come up with a meal idea which excites us, leading us once again to those convenient foods which we know are no good for us. It’s a really complex issue and not one I can solve single handedly, but as one of our lovely customers said to me last week, “it’s all drops in the ocean, but every drop counts!” I’m now emailing those of you who have a box a “recipe of the week”, which hopefully saves you some mental energy on deciding what to cook. All these recipes are also available on our recipe page for you to refer back to any time. You can also search recipes by ingredient if you want to know what to do with a specific veg. There is even an option to print each recipe, which brings up a black and white PDF version for you. Let’s get cooking!

If you would like to sign up for a veg box, please fill out this form. Please note, our Tuesday collection slot is nearly fully booked, so we are adding a Friday slot (1-2.30pm).

Last week’s veg box, sugar snap peas and cucumbers coming soon!

Farm update from Ryan

We have now finished calving until the autumn - we had two boys and three girls. Thanks to everyone that came up with name suggestions for them. Each year we name the animals all with the same letter of the alphabet, moving to the next letter each year. This year we are on the letter Q, so not the easiest, but we managed to have over 20 suggestions. So far, we have decided to go with Quinton, Quartz, Queenie, Quince & Quirky; we are expecting another 4 calves during the autumn so plenty more naming opportunities.

We have had an unusual year with lambing, ending up with 10 male lambs in a row, then the last ewe that we were expecting gave birth to a ewe lamb. We wouldn’t usually name the sheep but we felt like she deserved a name so have decided to call her Frida. We have also named one of the boy lambs - sadly his mother rejected him and as a result we have had to bottle feed him. He usually spots us as soon as we enter the field and will come running. One of the children on a school visit to the farm wanted to name him Shadow and it felt like it suited him as he follows us around, bleating as if to say “come and feed me!”

Shadow the lamb

Managing our mob grazing has been a bit of a challenge as we are in the driest spring on record, resulting in the grass having limited growth. Fortunately, with our agro-forestry system we can coppice a few trees when the animals need the extra forage or the trees are becoming too tall for the animals to be able to browse. This gives us more resistance to drought and gives the animals the trace elements that they don’t get from just pasture. The trees also provided much needed shade for the animals.

Stuart’s volunteer update

We’ve received some very welcome rain in the last couple of weeks. After a very dry spring the grass has suddenly started growing quickly making all the animals very content.

Some of the trees we’ve planted in our orchards and agroforestry systems had been starting to struggle in the dry conditions. We’ve been mulching them with woodchip to help eliminate competition from grass growing around them and to preserve what moisture there is. Our wonderful team of volunteers have been a great help with this task.

Our hardworking group of volunteers busy mulching

Our team of volunteers meet at the farm every Tuesday morning. They’ve done a brilliant job restoring the Forest Garden at the farm which had previously been neglected for many years. We’ve been harvesting a bumper crop of raspberries, gooseberries, red and white currents the last few weeks. The garden is full of edible and fruiting plants, some more unusual than others. We’ve already harvested Babington’s leeks (perennial leeks), Turkish rocket and garden sorrel. All perennials that come back every year so low maintenance once established. Other crops we hope to be harvesting later in the year include szechuan pepper, quince and for the first time Japanese yam.

The forest garden is designed to mimic a natural woodland system, but the plant species are carefully selected for the production of food or to compliment other edible species (e.g. nutrient accumulators or to attract beneficial insects). There are many layers within the forest garden ranging from large trees to smaller trees, shrubs, ground cover plants, root crops and the climbers that grow in between. It’s the symbiotic relationships between these plants that forms the greater whole making the system extremely resilient. No one crop is necessarily more productive than when grown as a monoculture but the combined yield makes it highly productive.  

Summer Time - Shop Opening Times

Our farm shop is open:

Tuesday - !3:00 - 14:30, Friday - 13:00 - 14:30, Saturday - 09:00 - 10:30

We have fresh supply of beef, lamb and juice available. Those wishing to purchase outside of these times can email haye-farm@outlook.com or call Stuart on 07732 489195 to arrange.

Veg boxes are available and can be ordered here.