🌸 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
Open Farm Sunday, 9th June 2024
On Sunday 9th June, we will hold our open day as part of the national event ‘Open Farm Sunday’, when the farm will be open from 9.45am until 3pm. It’s an ideal opportunity to be taken round our fields and find out what’s growing on the farm at the moment. It’s also a great opportunity for a rare volunteering session open to the public, led by the growers.
Sunday 9th June, 9.45am – 3pm
Volunteer morning, bring-a-picnic, children’s activities, tour
In the morning, join in with the volunteer morning to help the growers progress a seasonal task at this busy time of year when all the crops for the coming year need to be planted out.
Come and have a tour round the fields, polytunnels and orchard and bring a picnic to enjoy in the social area.
There will be hot and cold drinks available and children’s activities to enable their discovery of the farm. The Willows Project will also have a cash stall selling herbs their participants have potted and grown and skin products they have made. They are also going to be firing up their pizza oven (pizzas available while ingredients last and cash donations appreciated).
What the day will look like:
9.45am – open day starts
10am-1pm – volunteer morning led by the growers, with tea break around 11.15
1pm onwards – bring your own picnic lunch, time to socialise
1.30pm – farm tour for about an hour, starting at the pole barn/social area
We hope to see you there.
With bright summer wishes, Ali
Educational visits at Canalside
2024: January news – Busy January
It’s been a busy January on the farm as we work to get the new season underway – our tunnel potatoes are now planted in tunnel 1 into the remnants of last year’s hotbeds spread over the bed thanks to a great couple of volunteer mornings.
At the same time a new load of muck has arrived from a local farm plus we’ve supplemented it with a load of chicken muck from Skye Orchard Eggs (the egg scheme for anyone who gets eggs from the egg shed) to make our new hotbeds this season so we can generate some heat and sow our first seeds next week.
Despite the challenges we’ve harvested lots of lovely veg from the fields – our carrots have been great this year and we’re still trying to add as much diversity as possible to your share with things like black Spanish radish, cabbages and Jerusalem artichokes. It was great to get a share of fresh claytonia (winter salad) thanks to some serious weeding that we did on the last day before we closed for Christmas.
Meanwhile, rest assured the orchard is thoroughly wassailed (!) as we had a great turn out for our social and orchard work morning, pruning lots of the soft fruits ready for re-growth and abundance later in the year. Many thanks to everyone who came along.
Eleanor, grower
(All photos Eleanor Brown unless credited otherwise)
2022 summer party tickets now on sale!
This year’s summer party – the first since the pandemic – will take place on Saturday 16th June 2022 from 6pm. For full details, including ticket sales, click here!
Help us buy more land for our community!
Please donate to Canalside Community Food
Canalside Community Food has always relied on the rent of neighbouring Leasowe Farm’s land for our fruit.
Canalside now has the opportunity to purchase an adjacent field of 2.25 acres (see map below) so that we can plant an orchard on land that we own, and safeguard the availability of our own fresh fruit for the future.
At our most recent AGM, we agreed to put £10,000 of our reserve funds towards this purchase. That still leaves us short by between £15,000-£20,000, so we agreed to appeal for donations from the wonderful community that we serve.
We would therefore appeal to anyone who shares our vision and passion for Canalside Community Food to donate what they can for this investment in the future of Canalside and the diversity we can offer.
Not only will this purchase enable us to plant and maintain an orchard on our own land in perpetuity, but it will also increase the value of the current land, and provide a wonderful new area for the entire community to enjoy.
We need to finalise this wonderful opportunity by Spring 2021, and would be extremely grateful for any donation you can make before then.
For further information, please contact Gareth Davies.
To donate, please complete the donation form and we will be in touch with you about making your payment. And as a thank you for donating, you will get a beautiful poster of images from Canalside.
2020: November news – Heart Beets
It was the final big seasonal workday of 2020, my final one as head grower here, and hopefully the last one we’ll ever have to do under lockdown, fingers crossed… and it was wonderful, with eager beet-pickers of all ages defying the wet weather forecast and ripping red roots from the earth from sunrise (well, it was 10am and there wasn’t any sun, but I’m pleading artistic licence). All in all we picked 990 kilos of which about a quarter is the golden variety. They are all tucked away clamped in sand at the back of the barn – huge thanks to the clamping team, the unsung heroes of the day. Beets store well in this way until June, so there’ll be lots to look forward to in 2021!
The beet harvest in progress 
Beet clamping
Onion planting – still needs to happen despite COVID-19…
This year’s onion planting will happen in a slightly different way to usual, to make sure this big annual task can be completed whilst at the same time enabling members to get out in the fresh air and still maintain the recommended social distancing measures.
Come and help plant the main onion crop – a task suitable for all ages! The work will continue for as many days as needed (Tuesday-Saturday) and any member who is well and symptom free, and has not been advised to self-isolate, is welcome to come and join in – the work will be arranged so that social distancing measures can be maintained.
Due to COVID-19 we will not be providing any refreshments or arranging shared food during onion planting work sessions. You are encouraged to bring a flask with your own hot drinks, and are welcome to bring a packed lunch if you want to work both sides of lunchtime.
We will be contacting members to let them know when the work can start (dependent on the ground being dry enough for the land to be prepared). Saturday 4th April or 11th April onwards – to be advised
Summer party 2019 – tickets now on sale!
Tickets are now available to buy:
Through this website – click here.
In Gaia, 7 Regent Place, Leamington Spa. Please ask whoever is at the till.
£7 for anyone 16yrs or over who isn’t a Canalside member, £5 for anyone 16yrs or over who is a member. Under 16s get in free!
Open day at the farm on 9th June 2019 for Open Farm Sunday
Come and visit the farm for a tour with our head grower and a picnic (bring your own) this coming Sunday! The gates of our farm will be open between 11am and 3.30pm.
- Find out about Canalside Community Food
- Have a tour of the vegetable fields and fruit orchard – tours start at 11.30am and 2pm
- Speak to staff and members
- Bring a picnic to enjoy in our family friendly social area
