🌸 Spring Celebration, Sat 3rd May 🥳
Our Spring Celebration is this Saturday May 3rd, midday until late. The Maypole ribbons are ready for the dance! It’s time for Canalsiders to have some Spring fun and to welcome new faces into the farm. The plan is:
🌸 ‘Decorate your Spring Bonnet and Bunting’ Family Activity
🌼 Spring Face painting offered by Aggy’s Girls Group “Girls Go Wild”
🌸 ‘Maypole Celebration’ Radford Semele School children dance at 2pm
🌼 Look for what grows and lives at Canalside with Pam Reason leading “BioBlitz” at 3pm.
“A BioBlitz is a natural history event that focuses on finding and identifying as many species as possible in a specific area in a short period of time. Record all of the plants, birds, animals and insects that we see. We will create a snapshot of the biodiversity on the farm, as well as learning more about the natural world on our doorstep!”
🌸 It’s ‘Bring a Picnic’ 🧺🥪🧁🍏
🌼 Cake stall 🧁 plus 🫖tea, ☕coffee and 🥤🍏🍎orchard apple juice
🌸 Welcoming ‘Chacma’ delicious Chilli Bhajis from 3pm
🌼 Canalside Bar serving Belvoir Farm lemonade, Purity Brewing Co. I.P.A. and Pure Helles Lager, Drop Bear Beer Co. Yuzu Pale Ale 0.5%, wines and a Spring Perry Elder Fizz!
🌸 It’s Happy Hour from 4pm!
🌼 Wear your Spring Bonnet and see you there!
Looking forward to seeing you there with a Spring in your step!
🌸🥳 Canalside team 🍾🍰
🌸🥳 Spring Celebration in brief
Timings:
Saturday 3rd May, noon until late
What’s on:
Decorate your Spring Bonnet and Bunting
Face painting
Bioblitz
Maypole dancing at 2pm
Bar
Chacma bhajis from 3pm
Cake stall
Hot drinks
What to bring (if you wish):
A picnic
Spring bonnet to decorate
Cash/card for drink/food purchases
Space for new members
🥕🥦🧅 We have space for new subscribers at Canalside Community Food, a local organic farm just outside Leamington. 🍅🧄🍏
🥕 Choose from 3 different sized ‘shares of the harvest’ and collect weekly from the farm (or, with a wait, our Leamington collection point).
🥦 Buy a 4-week trial of the harvest to see if it suits your household. Click here to find out more and express interest in a trial.
🍎 Regular opportunities to get involved with work and social events.
🧄 Not interested in receiving produce but would like to get involved or volunteer? Click here to become a social member instead!
Vacancy at Canalside for a Finance Administrator
We are currently recruiting – please see full details on our jobs page.
2025: January news
It is time for the first newsletter of 2025. We have been back from the winter break and going since four weeks now already… I can hardly believe it.
Over the last month we have seen a few pretty windy days which have blown the covers about on the farm. So we have kept a vigilant eye (or two) as the covers are protecting some of the most precious crops at the moment, like Purple Sprouting Broccoli, Cauliflowers and Cabbages. These have been planted in June/July and are still out there and growing and ripening. At this time of the year the birds are relentless and devour any bit of Brassica leaf that becomes available to them.
There have also been quite a few frosty days and nights, which means we have kept the tunnel doors shut and the indoor crops wrapped up under some warming fleece. Still the indoor lettuce has been suffering from the temperatures and the moist conditions. At the same time some of the overwintering crops in the tunnels like Spring Greens, Spinach, Spring Onions and Pak Choi are still waiting for slightly more warmth and longer daylight hours to kick-start their growth.
Work at the farm in January kept me extremely busy and was definitely not the wind-down that the winter usually promises. While we are cutting down on working hours in winter heavily, there is also a heavily reduced team conducting the work at the moment. A zero sum game as such.
We have been using the available time to harvest for the share, to plan for the next season, and to prepare the farm for the next season. These jobs are ongoing throughout the season but an intensive focus on the planning at this time is essential to ensure a relatively smooth running for the rest of the year.
At the tail-end of January we get a proper first idea that it is not too long until spring is starting. Our first sowings are looming (the very first rocket has already been drilled in the tunnel) and further tunnels are prepared for the early potatoes and carrots to go in within the next week or so. At the same time we are setting up our propagation areas, ready to raise those first little precious seedlings.
Lena, grower
Vacancy at Canalside for Assistant Grower
We are currently recruiting – please see full details on our jobs page.
2024: October news
Samhain is upon us, marking the end of the traditional harvest season and the beginning of winter. The word “Samhain” is derived from old Irish and means “summer’s end.” In the Celtic calendar the start of November is also the start of the year, beginning when everything around us is in nature is dying. The plants and trees drop their seeds and the new year is sown into the compost of the old, laying dormant until Spring.
As we now move into our Winter hours at the start of November it has also meant saying goodbye to Dan, our seasonal grower, who has been supporting our work at the farm through the busy summer season. We are very thankful for his hard work and all his contributions during his time here at Canalside and wish him well for his journey ahead.
As we are not a traditional farm and instead provide our members with produce all year round we still have plenty of work to pack into our days, but less days are worked and there is much planning to be done so we are grateful for the shift out of the intensity of the summer season.
Change always comes in small ways in the Autumn. The annual ‘switch off’ of the staff fridge in the pole barn and the electric kettle (which is extra low in energy use to guarantee that our off grid solar systems can cope) and the switch to heating water with gas means we save our precious sun energy for charging floodlights to help our members navigate their way to collect their veg on the dark Tuesday evenings. The daylight hours are noticeably shorter, and more importantly for growing, the chances for sunlight dwindle exponentially.
Another end of an era has been the tearing down of our completely disintegrated tool shed, which was in such bad shape that we are not even really missing it! This has been part of the work on improving the drainage around the barn. Big thanks to both Paul and Craig who have done a lot of work on this to get it to a stage where we hope to avoid having the barn flooded all winter.
The biggest work of the last month has been a lot of our main crop harvesting. Much gratitude to all our volunteers who have been helping with this. A couple of very early frosts killed off the squash and pumpkin foliage and we had to bring them in about 3-4 weeks earlier than usual. Not only did the plants die back early, but frosts can also impact the longevity of squash in storage. We got them in within 2 days of work and stored them safely, also providing the first pumpkin share of the year in the run-up to Halloween/Samhain.
The apple harvest is ongoing, about half the crop has been brought in and by the time you read this the later varieties should all have been picked. These will be stored and integrated into your veg share over the next few months. We enjoyed the fabulous apple pressing day in mid October with the start of apple picking and lots of juice making.
The share has been a real array of autumn colours; leafy greens are still a big part of the share with some huge pak choi, beautiful chard and we had a lovely couple of shares of tasty sweetcorn (which are not getting enough sunlight hours in Britain and often struggle with growth here). We had some surprise cauliflowers which came up a lot earlier than expected and made a great addition to the share for a few weeks, and we particularly enjoy the amazing purple turnips. It’s been another strong year for tomatoes which have been abundant all the way through the summer until now.
We have begun buying in a little supplementary veg this week, all organic and grown in the UK, to make sure that we do not deplete our existing crops too quickly too and early on so we protect against a large harvesting gap next year. We hope you enjoy the carrots and onions in addition to the array of veg we were able to grow here on site.
The last of our main crop harvests to be done in the coming weeks are beetroot and celeriac so do come and join us when these volunteer sessions are advertised.
The growers, October 2024
Vacancy at Canalside for Lead Grower and Manager
We are currently recruiting – please see full details on our jobs page.
Apple pressing and autumn open day, Sat 12th Oct 2024, 10-3
Come and visit our farm for a fun autumn day out!
10am-12noon: Join in with a volunteer morning in the orchard
From 11am: Apple pressing – suitable for all ages. Bring your own apples if you have spare from a tree in the garden and/or bottles to take juice home in.
Bring a picnic lunch to enjoy in the social area/pole barn.
Time TBC: Take a farm tour to find out what we grow.
Event details on Canalside’s Facebook group
2024: July news
A very warm welcome to our new members who have subscribed after their produce trials – and hello to all Canalsiders who take the time to read this newsletter! The intent is to keep you connected to what is happening in the fields and to the source of your food and the people who grow it, as is our CSA ethos.
As usual, July has been a flat out kind of month! It’s been all hands on deck to get the last main plantings into the ground which we’ve done well within schedule. Joining all the main crops mentioned last month we now have leeks and late brassicas (over wintering cauliflowers, purple sprouting broccoli and cabbage) planted as well as various other rotational crops (e.g. the popular New Zealand spinach planted in the wake of tunnel potatoes).
The weather this month has been a game of two halves. Decent rain earlier in the month gave us a welcome break with irrigation, but obviously it wasn’t as warm as some of the plants would like. Summer crops like peppers and aubergines need much more sun and it’s been a slow start to the season all in all due to the earlier delays and cooler weather. The share has looked more like June than ‘as it should’ in July. The beans and tomatoes are starting to pick up now but crops we would have expected to be harvesting already like our first planted kohl rabi and cabbage are still growing and our tunnel carrots never got that big before they needed to be picked. Tasty all the same, and the share has felt fresh and varied. Spring onions have been a feature of my recent meals! We’ve also been getting some of our biggest harvests of cucumbers and the courgettes are really kicking in now. We hope you’ve enjoyed some of the berries and currants that the orchard has offered us too.
↖️ Harvesting early polytunnel carrots
Picking abundant cucumbers ↗️
The second half of July then kicked into sunshine and summer arrived! Great for crop growth and everyone’s spirits whilst bringing the inevitable challenge of field irrigation.
After a hot week and the 30 degree Friday we found a problem with our water pressure (due to an issue with Severn Trent) which left our fields unwatered over a weekend and highlighted yet again the issues of our system. Had the issue gone on indefinitely, it would have only been due to unforecast overnight rain into the Monday that our crops would have survived. As a grower responsible for your food, I can’t begin to explain the stress and feelings of powerlessness when things like this happen. To walk around the fields and see everything we built from scratch on this land, the many people and hands who have co-created this place over the last 18 years and the journey each of these specific crops have made this year and the care that has gone into tending them: my gratitude to the rain is immense. And the fragility is palpable. Even when the water pressure is working fine, it is still not high enough to water all our fields adequately during a drought period. We must find a way to bring sustainable and off-grid systems to our farm, we must find solutions to adapt to the challenges and these changing times and preserve the ability to grow our own food amongst a UK farming crisis and an impending food shortage.
But for now – back to the minutia. Weeding is the name of the game for the coming weeks, as anyone coming to volunteer at the moment well knows! We are also broadcasting our green manures and trying out a new under sowing in our late brassica section. This is a special mix created by Ian Tolhurst that we will broadcast after our initial weeding of the brassicas to create cover and suppress weeds, fingers crossed it works.
Thanks so much to everyone who has come out to help the growing work this month. It was great to see some new faces as we trialled a Tuesday afternoon session and we’ll let you know through Ali’s weekly bulletins when we do any more of these – otherwise do come down during the school holidays if you can to join our regular Wednesday volunteer session (10am – 1pm) – we love to see you.
Thanks for reading and ‘til next time
The growers, July 2024
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Full details about the event here and on the poster below.
