Blog
Cucumbers: so much more than salad
Plot 19 have a glut of cucumbers. so it’s a good time to make them into recipes for food and body and savour them for months to come.
Is it a fruit or is it a veg?
Before we go any further, let’s clear this one up. Botanically, a cucumber is classified as a fruit. This is because it contains tiny seeds in the middle and grows from the flower of the cucumber plant. But most of us recognise it as a vegetable.
Cucumbers are a member of the cucurbitaceae family (gourd family) which also includes courgettes, squash, melons, and pumpkins.
Cucumbers in history
The cucumber is one of the most ancient vegetables. It originated in India over 4000 years ago. It was extremely popular in the Roman Empire with Emperor Tiberius (14 – 16 AD) demanding cucumber to eat every day of the year.
Cucumbers arrived in England in 14th century but were not popular. They returned with more success in the mid-17th century. In the US, about the same time, a medical prejudice against uncooked fruit and vegetables meant that the cucumber fell out of favour.
Nowadays, cucumbers are used all around the world.
Growing cucumbers
Cucumbers are a fast-growing crop. They like fertile soil and warm temperatures. They do not tolerate frost. The main care requirement is consistent and generous watering (they need at least an inch of water a week (more, if it’s particularly hot) and they can become bitter if the watering is inconsistent. So, thanks to Team 19 & 20 for their efforts here.
In the UK, cucumber production is concentrated in parts of the North East and South East of England.
Cucumbers for health
Cucumbers are nutritious. They are low in calories and high in fibre and, at 96% water, cucumbers can help keep you hydrated. Cucumbers aren’t a stand out source of vitamins and minerals but they wins with their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
As well as taking their nourishment internally through food and drink, you can use cucumbers to soothe your skin. Place cucumber slices on your closed eyes to cool the sensitive skin around the eyes and reduce puffiness. Or try this recipe for a cucumber face mask:
- Mash up half a cucumber in a blender or with a fork. It’s fine as it is but, to ring the changes, add a tablespoon of natural yogurt or a tablespoon of oats and another of honey.
- Spread over your face and neck and leave for 15 mins.
- Rinse off with lukewarm water.
Cooking with cucumbers
A raw cucumber lasts about a week in the fridge but you can make the most of a glut by cooking the cucumbers. Try these ideas.
Cucumber relish. This US recipe is for a classic sweet pickle that goes with most foods. https://www.food.com/recipe/cucumber-relish-11147. (You’ll find this conversion chart from US cups to UK grams handy.)
Cucumber pickle. This keeper is especially good with a strong, hard cheese or with cold meats https://www.riverford.co.uk/recipes/cucumber-pickle
Cucumber soup. This pretty green soup works equally well warm or chilled. https://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/soups/late-summer-cucumber-soup
Cucumber ice cubes. Slice cucumber thinly into an ice cube tray before you fill it with water. (You could also add some mint from the HCF Herb Garden.) Use the cucumber ice cubes to add a refreshing flavour to summer drinks.
Find lots more recipes for cucumbers here. Which is your favourite?
Three summer crops
Three regular HCF summer crops burst onto our list of available produce this week. Find out more about the broad beans, pattypans, and fennel and let us know if you’ve got a favourite seasonal recipe.
Broad beans
These beans are on Pick Your Own. Their season is short so fill a bag or two now and enjoy them fresh or freeze them for the months to come.
Gently peel the pods away from the stems of the plant. (If you yank them, you risk breaking the stem or even uprooting the plant.)
To prepare them, slit the fat outer pod and run your thumb along the furry inside to pop out the broad beans. You can use them like this but they are even better if you go on to double-pod them – removing the thick skin that encases each individual bean. Blanch the beans for a couple of minutes, let them cool slightly, then remove the outer skin to reveal the tender, bright green bean below. Smaller beans are more faff to pod but they’ll pay you back in sweetness; the bigger beans can get mealy over time.
Broad beans are a good source of protein and vitamins A & B and super versatile. You can eat them in salads, crushed into dips, stirred into risotto or summer casseroles… You’ll find dozens of recipes online; here are a couple to get you started:
Fennel
Every part of this plant is edible, from the thick, crisp bulb to the feathery leaves. It has a fresh anise flavour – very present if you eat it raw, fading to a mellow backnote if it’s cooked. To have fennel through the winter, blanch and freeze it. It won’t keep the crisp texture of fresh raw fennel but it’ll do just fine in a cooked meal. Fennel is high in fibre, potassium and vitamin C.
Simply slice raw fennel into salads or prepare slices or chunks for cooking. You can grill it, fry it, roast it, blend it into soups … try these ideas:
Pattypans
These odd-looking vegetables are summer squash. Their scalloped edge and slightly flattened shape get them comparisons to flying saucers or flattened brioche.
Their taste is similar to courgettes, perhaps a little sweeter. Unlike their winter cousins, you don’t need to peel them – eat the skin as you would with a grilled or roasted pepper. They are super versatile, working well grilled, stuffed and baked, and roasted.
Pattypans are loaded with fibre and a great source of vitamins A and C. Here are a couple of ideas:
What do you do with these summer veg? Let us know how you make them delicious.
Herbilicious!
Our herb garden is flourishing. As well as favourites like rosemary, thyme, and chives, we grow some less well-known herbs. These are hard to find in shops so it’s well worth picking some to try next time you’re at the farm.
Sweet cicely
This herb was used to sweeten food long before sugar came to the UK and is still useful today to reduce the sugar needed with tart fruit. Worth a try with the last of this season’s rhubarb…
Sweet cicely has soft, ferny leaves and white umbrella of flowers, looking a bit like cow parsley. Add the leaves to raw or cooked dishes.
Try sweet cicely in rhubarb and sweet cicely compote or go savoury with fried pork and sweet cicely.
Lovage
Lovage has been valued for its medicinal and culinary properties since ancient times. As well as vitamins, it contains anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.
The leaves look a little like flat-leaf parsley. The whole plant is edible, offering a mild celery-like flavour. (In Italy, it’s often referred to as “mountain celery”.) The green leaves are very good chopped into salads or lightly cooked summer veg. Steam the stems – the flavour mellows in cooking.
Try lovage in courgette and lovage pasta or a new potato salad.
French tarragon
This tender herb is more widely available in the UK – but it will typically be imported. Also known as true tarragon, it’s one of the four “fines herbes” in traditional French cooking, offering a sweet anise flavour. Tarragon is particularly suitable with fish, chicken and eggs.
Beware of the imposter, Russian tarragon. It looks similar but doesn’t bring the tingly aniseed taste to the tongue.
Try tarragon in the classic bearnaise sauce, with new season carrots or this year’s Coronation quiche.
Have you used our sweet cicely, lovage, or French tarragon? What did you make?
Weather, watering and crops – using water wisely
Andrew Ross explains how much water our crops need in warm weather – possibly much more than you thought!
Water meters help us to discover the condition of the soil and new solar-charged irrigation is taking some of the load – but we still depend heavily on stakeholders with watering cans!
The irrigation project
Mike Lucas has recently completed Phase 1 of our irrigation project. It is all run on solar energy and draws water from the pond. A panel collects the sun’s energy which is stored in a battery for night use or cloudy day use. One of our pumps is capable of pumping 200 cu m of water per month into our IBCs at a slow but steady rate. The other pump feeds the standpipes situated along the Roman Road. Hopefully, gone are the days of using a petrol burning engine and lugging heavy and leaky standpipes (although they remain in reserve).
Mike will be beginning some experimental work on Phase 2 this summer, using timers attached to the IBCs and drip feeds to small areas of appropriate crops.
Rainfall, evapotranspiration, and watering
We are now entering the time of year when evaporation from the surface of the soil and from plants generally exceeds the rainfall and so we need to make up the difference with irrigation. (1 mm of rain is equal to 1 litre of rainfall or watering on a square metre).
Last week at Highbridge Community Farm, around 25 litres of water evaporated from each square meter of vegetated land!
With normal June weather, we can expect around 92 litres of water to be lost from each square metre over the whole month. If the weather is hot, dry and windy, this might even be more! So, if we should have a dry June, July and August like 2022 with a total of only 60 mm rain, we will have to do a lot of watering. Our watering cans hold 10 litres. If no rain falls in June, each square metre of actively growing plants will need around 9 or 10 watering cans of water over the month – that is 2 or 3 cans of water per square metre per week.
We have added a lot of organic matter to our soil which acts like a sponge holding water. The top 30 cm of soil will hold about 90 litres per square metre when at its field capacity. As the soil dries out, plants grow less well and stop growing when the amount of water in the top 30 cm falls to about 60 litres. By the time the soil has only 30 litres of water left in, it most of the plants will have died!
Watering your crops
- Please do water your crops thoroughly, particularly if little or no rain has fallen. It isn’t sufficient just to wet the surface. You need to see an increase in the moisture levels down to 10 cm and ideally to as far as the roots grow down and to where you find that the soil is already wet.
This is a moisture meter. Use this before and after watering. Holding the metal sensor, push it into the soil to a depth of 5 cm and read the gauge. Push it in about 10 cm and read again. After watering, the readings at 5cm and 10 cm should be at least a MOIST 6 to a WET 8 on your scale.
- For most crops (except salads), it is better to water a bed thoroughly with 2 or 3 cans of water per square metre once a week than to sprinkle a can over a whole bed every day as most of that water will not infiltrate more than 2 or 3 cm. This is because deeper roots will not receive any water and a lot of the surface moisture will simply evaporate away very quickly.
- Ideally, water in the evening (or early morning) to give plants the opportunity to take up as much water as possible. Water the soil, not the plants.
Water is a limited resource. Use it wisely!
Growing a new HCF team
Wild Hive Ecological Educational Collective is helping us to grow a new HCF team. Welcome to Green Team@HCF! Wild Hive founder, Jo Hutchison, explains how it works.
Find the story of Wild Hive here and about the Wild Hive outreach projects here.
After quite a journey to date, Wild Hive is delighted to have come full circle back to Highbridge Community Farm from which our educational outreach initiative originally stemmed.
We’re very excited to have been offered a couple of good sized patches on Jim’s team’s plots – particularly because the children now have their own area right beside their play-hut and pollinator garden – in which to grow their own! These areas will amply fit all four of our Local Grow Packs, and hopefully leave a little space for other things the children might wish to try.
Wild Hive Collective CIC is helping the Green Team @HCF to form, and, whilst trialling the Local Grow Packs, will offer sessions to support and monitor the growing. The idea is that with a little guidance and initial steer, the children will gradually organise themselves, manage their activities, and develop a sense of agency with space of their own in the heart of Highbridge Community Farm.
Certainly in the initial stages, it will be helpful to have some adult helpers for input and guidance (when wanted!). If you are a stakeholder and either you or you child(ren) are in joining the Green Team @HCF and/or supporting Wild Hive in any way, please complete this form.
The intention is that Wild Hive Collective CIC will use the sowing, growing & harvesting of the Local Grow Packs as an opportunity to help this team of younger ‘farm-hands’ (currently HCF stakeholder children only) to gather together and to sow, harvest and enjoy meals that they have grown, whilst they naturally become the ecological growers and nature custodians of the future.
Find out more
Find Wild Hive on Facebook and Instagram. If you’re an HCF stakeholder and you’d like to know more about Green Team@HCF or to get involved, find Jo at the farm or fill in this form.
Wild Hive educational outreach projects
Wild Hive Ecological Educational Collective gets our local schools and neighbourhoods growing. Founder Jo Hutchison shares how they’re doing this.
Find the story of Wild Hive here. Discover here how Wild Hive is helping to grow a new HCF team: GreenTeam@HCF.
Permaculture design for people & place
We were very lucky to have been joined at the start of our journey by Liz Darley (Grow South Permaculture), who brought Permaculture principles to life for our expanding network at various local educational and community garden sites, including The Outdoor Wildlife Lodge at Otterbourne School, ‘The Hive’ (College House) in Compton (then Eastleigh College’s site), and Youth Options’ Outdoor Learning Centre in Bishopstoke.
Our projects and approach have been greatly informed by Children in Permaculture, and we continue to be helped and encouraged by that team and the network of practitioners and educators from The Permaculture Association.
Last year, we trialled a bespoke, condensed Practical Permaculture Intro mini-course with Eastleigh College’s Functional Skills/Enterprise students. We also realised the benefits of offering one-off Practical Permaculture Design Tasters, helping to draw active participants together at sites that are ripe for renovation.
‘Growing to School’ pilot
With the support from four local Primary Schools, in Spring 2022 we launched our ‘Growing to School’ pilot project, which involved:
- Creating 250 Little Local Grow Kits (Spring: Potatoes & Pollinators) for children to grow at home with the support of our online community (raising £550 for Save the Children’s Ukraine fund);
- Developing Local Grow Packs to make immediate use of the existing beds and growing spaces in schools;
- Trialling the formation of Green Teams of children and parents/carers to support growing activities; and,
- Running some in-class Children in Permaculture-style growing sessions to enable more children to have the opportunity to ‘grow a meal’ and be part of the perpetual growing cycle.
Changemakers at The Point (Eastleigh’s new Sustainability Hub)
Autumn 2022 marked the start of our Changemaker residency at The Point – as part of Eastleigh’s new Sustainability Hub. This was the prompt we needed to register as a Community Interest Company in order for our enterprise to become sustainable itself.
With a little seed funding from The National Lottery’s Community Fund (via The Point), we were able to develop and run a series of nature-led “Small but Mighty” Creative Imagining sessions for families and adults in Spring ‘23, and will continue to support The Point’s Big Ideas’ events and offer more seasonal sessions throughout the year.
Our Creative Imaginings sessions are intended to invite creative responses, as we adopt new perspectives to explore nature in our urban areas, and discover ways to appreciate and revitalise our local ecosystem.
Practical Permaculture Pathway for schools
This year, our focus for our ‘Growing to School project is on further developing a Practical Permaculture Pathway of transformative and curriculum linked sessions for children in schools.
During phase 2 of our pilot project, we will be running a series of Children in Permaculture-informed sessions at Scantabout Primary School in Chandlers Ford – aligned with our seasonal Local (School) Grow Packs that the children will be growing.
We are on the steering group for Southampton University’s Growing Wild Citizens project and considering ways that offerings such as ours could support hyper-local ‘hives’ of schools and practitioners – for sustainable school-site based growing/nature-led sessions. Also, as Community Representatives for HIWWT’s Team Wilder, we are looking into ways to develop our Practical Permaculture Pathway as a route that schools could follow to naturally be recognised as an HIWWT Wilder School: https://www.hiwwt.org.uk/Schools-groups.
Local (School) Grow Packs & Local (Home) Grow Kits
Developing and fully testing our Organic Local (School) Grow Packs is our other area of focus for 2023-24, and we are fortunate to have some excellent Seed Team advisors. Paul Dibden and Sarah Flynn are both HCF stakeholders, and Debra Cave is a Permaculture practitioner with a passion for perennials. We are also having help and advise from our friends at Aldermoor Community Farm.
Our four seasonal Local Grow Packs have been designed to grow meals that can be harvested within the school terms, but not necessarily needing to be grown in school settings. We are very grateful to the following test bed sites for allowing us to trial our Local Grow Packs with their user-groups – to see how much more ecological growing engagement, enthusiasm and enabling results from direct involvement and linked learning:
- Toynbee Secondary School
- Youth Options’ Outdoor Learning Centre
- Aldermoor Community Farm
- The Point
- Highbridge Community Farm
Growing beyond the plot
Alongside these longer term projects and activities, we’re using our Local Grow Packs and Kits for small group and one-off growing sessions, and are going to be championing the plotting of more accessible community growing spaces within our local “Good to Grow Network” – to enable more sharing of time, space, skills, resources and harvests.
Get involved
If you’re interested to get involved, find Wild Hive on Facebook and Instagram , email wildhivecollective@gmail.com, or fill in this form.
Wild Hive takes community farming to the community
From its inception in the dark days of pandemic lockdown to its current set of thriving local initiatives, Wild Hive Ecological Educational Collective is going from strength to strength. In the first of this series, Founder Jo Hutchison describes how she envisioned and developed Wild Hive.
Find out about the Wild Hive outreach projects here. Discover here how Wild Hive is helping to grow a new HCF team: GreenTeam@HCF.
Cast your minds back to the darker days of lockdown, and you’ll remember how fortunate many of us felt to have the sanctuary of Highbridge Community Farm; the space to draw breath while the children roamed freely; and the reassurance of knowing that we could access the food we were still growing together (albeit, at a social distance). At a time when we were learning new ways to connect with each other, many people were also finding comfort in a renewed connectedness with nature. As the pace of life slowed, and the man-made noise quietened, nature found its voice. And we started to listen.
Inspiration for a local future
Like many others, I sought to counter the troubling daily news briefings with podcasts that offered hope and inspiration. It was during one of my ‘hour-a-day’ walks around our local neighbourhood, that I heard Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures, sharing her thoughts about a localised future – where most of our food comes from nearby farmers to ensure food security year round; and money circulates in the local economy to grow prosperity. A localised future where, essentially, we take stock of the wealth of skills and assets we have, and connect them together to re-discover ways to live more lightly and in harmony with nature and each other.
If this interview and the Local Futures film, ‘The Economics of Happiness’ sowed the seed for a grass-roots initiative in my mind, it was the energy from Pam Warhurst (founder of Incredible Edible), the pragmatism of Transition Network (remembering how Eastleigh Transition Network had conceived Highbridge Community Farm), and ultimately, the lockdown TED talk from Transition founder, Rob Hopkins, that gave me the fresh perspectives I needed for my wilder ideas to germinate.
Time to outreach community farming?
With the clarity that came from those solitary walks, I thought hard about what it was that had enabled Highbridge Community Farm to thrive for over a decade. Struck by the abandoned school fields and empty growing beds, I contemplated how school grounds could become the sustainable and bio-diverse National Education Nature Park that the Department for Education was calling for, whilst serving the immediate needs of the children – many of whom were struggling with their mental health due to the disruption to their education. I started dreaming up various ways we could potentially take community farming to the community.
There and then.
Here and now.
Could a combination of stakeholdership rather than voluntary helpers, and time-slotted year-round access to shared ‘Education/Community Farms’ on the edge of school grounds or educational sites, enable many more members of our local community to enjoy the same benefits as our Highbridge Community Farm stakeholders do?
Why, I wondered, when so many were having to stay home to school, and too many didn’t have gardens of their own, weren’t the turfed (or plastic-grassed) school fields being transformed into educational food forests, or flourishing outdoor nature-classrooms? Surely, it was more critical then than ever to be passing on the practical growing skills our young people would need for such an uncertain future?
As pressures continued to mount to agree, let alone reach, essential Net Zero targets, wasn’t it imperative that we proactively encouraged the next generation to take one of the most positive environmental actions of all – to grow the means to capture carbon, whilst growing healthy food; increasing biodiversity; protecting nature; and helping to reduce the carbon emissions that are ‘wrapped into’ the food that is transported from further afield?
From “What if?” to “What next?”
In the spirit of Transition founder, Rob Hopkins’, profound question “From What If To What Next?”, I asked myself:
- What positive social and environmental impacts would be felt if we created the conditions for climate literacy to be deeply understood through its practice, and the savouring of resulting ‘riches’; as opposed to majoring on the theory, with the risk of focussing on what we as humans might be denied if we are to live more sustainably?
- What if we turned the fear and uncertainty on its head, and instead took the nourishing aspects of community farming into our schools and neighbourhood growing spaces, and encouraged more ecological and regenerative growing practices?
- What if we harvested the wealth of skills and expertise accumulated in our community farm, and shared it with larger cohorts and diverse groups of people ‘on their doorsteps’?
- Could we help create a cultural shift towards ‘active hope’ and optimism if we listened to, learned from and involved young people in the creation of more shared and “wildly abundant” local landscapes (“wildly abundant” being my, then 7-year old, son’s words)?
- What if we simply taught more children how to grow and make a bowl of nourishing soup? What ripple effects might be felt throughout our local community?
Extending the Community Farm objectives
As the lockdowns of 2020 continued into 2021, and life became more precious and precarious than ever, it felt imperative that we reconsider ways to approach educational and community growing projects and efforts. With the help of HCF’s Steve Grundy, we put out a survey to all the Farm stakeholders to gauge whether they felt the Farm was still meeting its original objectives and to see what appetite there was for more educational outreach. (You can see the results of the survey here.)
Informed by some of these responses, gradually the aims of our Wild Hive Ecological Education Collective took root in my mind – to do whatever we could to engage, enthuse and enable even more local growing and/or access to locally grown food (on whatever scale) – to improve health and wellbeing; to support nature (including ourselves) and ultimately, to protect our planet. Correlating our aims and the objectives of Highbridge Community Farm led us to being an offshoot initiative rather than simply part of the farm.
Fortunately, some other farm stakeholders shared my view and helped to get Wild Hive off the ground.
So, that was then, and this is now!
Becoming Wild Hive
Since Autumn 2021, we have grown from a handful of pioneering ‘farm-hands’ and educators, keen to develop the idea of educational outreach from Highbridge Community Farm, into a growing collective of passionate people, committed to turning our numerous ideas for a ‘greener, brighter future for all’ into reality.
Using Looby Macnamara’s ‘People in Permaculture’ design web, I started to design the Wild Hive Collective that was gradually taking shape. Here you can see the summary that I presented for my Children in Permaculture Design Certificate:
Within our core team, we now have myself, the original Courgette Team Leader at HCF, with a background in Communications & Community Engagement; Lizzie Dunn, an RHS trained Horticulturist, Landscape Manager and School Grounds Guru; Claire Clarke, an Ecologist and fellow HCF ‘old-timer’; Dedj Liebrandt, a Medical Herbalist with a desire to educate others; and Rachel Carey, an Education Consultant and School Green Team Champion.
In Autumn 2022, we registered as a Community Interest Company in order for our enterprise itself to become sustainable.
Since then, we’ve been working hard to build a network of collaborators, supporters, and local educational and community garden sites and to develop our educational outreach initiative.
Discover our projects
Find out more about our Wild Hive projects in the next blog in this series. Discover here how Wild Hive is going back where it all started to grow a new team at Highbridge Community Farm – the Green Team@HCF.
Get involved
If you’re interested to get involved, find Wild Hive on Facebook and Instagram, email wildhivecollective@gmail.com, or fill in this form.
Worming our way into soil health
Andrew Ross organises regular surveys of earthworms in our soil at Highbridge Community Farm. He explains why we do these surveys and what we learn.
Why we do worm surveys
Having a healthy soil is important if we wish to grow healthy, nutrient rich plants at Highbridge farm and eat healthily ourselves. Worm surveys are one of a few ways we use to monitor the health of our soil. We also have a nutrient analysis conducted every two years or so, which tells us the levels of organic matter (a measure of carbon and nitrogen levels), phosphorus (which is higher than we would wish) and potassium.
The National worm survey
In early February and March 2018, Dr Jackie Stroud, a Natural Environment Research Council Soil Expert at Rothamsted Research, led a project to study the worms in farm soils. A total of 126 farmers took part. We joined the project in 2019 following the national method, and have done a survey annually since, with the exception of last year, when the soil was so dry that there were very few worms in the top 20cm of soil.
How we do the survey
Each team digs a soil pit 20cm x 20cm x 20cm on their plot and removes all the soil to a tray. They then carefully sort through this sample and remove any worms they find into a smaller pot containing a little water (to keep the worm skins moist for breathing). Then we count the total number of worms in the sample and then divide them into adults and juveniles. Adults are identified as those having a saddle on their bodies which juveniles don’t have. The juveniles are counted and then returned to the soil. The adults are then sorted into one of three groups of worms with different roles in the soil ecosystem before being counted. Then all worms are returned to the soil.
Epigeic worms are small or medium sized darkish red worms that live on or very near the surface of fields with abundant leaf litter and feed on the leaf litter and deposit smaller, broken-down bits in the leaf litter for other organism to feed on, so accelerating the breakdown of leaf litter.
Endogeic worms are small or medium pale worms which are grey, pink or green or bluish. They make horizontal burrows through the soil to move around and to feed. In doing so, they mix soil and help release nutrients for plant uptake and so help to raise crop productivity.
Anecic earthworms are the large pencil sized worms which were heavily pigmented red or black . They make permanent vertical burrows in soil. They feed on leaves on the soil surface that they drag into their burrows. They also make middens (piles of casts) around the entrance to their burrows. The are great for making long vertical holes in the soil which improves drainage and allows more oxygen to get to the plant roots.
Our results
The table shows the number of adults counted each year in the soil sample taken from the even numbered plot. The figures list the numbers of first epigeic, then endogeic and then anecic worms.
| Plot | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2023 – to come |
| 2 | 0,3,0 | 3,0,1 | na | |
| 4 | 5,3,1 | 6,2,2 | 1,3,1 | |
| 6 | 0,6,1 | 0,0,0 | 0,0,0 | |
| 8 | 2,5,0 | 1,6,1 | na | |
| 10 | 0,6,1 | 1,0,0 | 1,0,0 | |
| 12 | 0,0,0 | 1,2,0 | 2,2,0 | |
| 14 | 0,4,5 | na | 0,0,0 | |
| 16 | 0,2,0 | 0,6,1 | 0,0,1 | |
| 18 | 1,4,0 | 1,0,0 | na | |
| 20 | 1,1,0 | 0,0,1 | 2,0,2 | |
Average per plot | 14.1 | 7.14 | 7.42 | |
| Average juveniles | 8.6 | 4.14 | 4.33 | |
| Average epigeic | 0.9 | 1.3 | 1.3 | |
| Average endogeic | 3.7 | 1.2 | 0.8 | |
| Average anecic | 0.8 | 0.5 | 0.9 |
Our results suggest that the numbers of adult worms went down from 2019 to 2020 and 2021. There are two possible explanations for these results. Either our farming practices are harming the soil for worms or changing seasonal weather (drier weather) may cause the endogeic and anecic worms to move lower in the soil. Rainfall for the months of January to March in Allbrook is shown below.
| Month | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 |
| Jan | 29 | 102 | 88 | 25 | 148 |
| Feb | 74 | 162 | 68 | 72 | 5 |
| Mar | 87 | 61 | 18 | 55 | 96 (to Mar 27th) |
This March has been the wettest in 5 years, so we are hoping that our worm numbers will be higher than in the last couple of counts and that worm numbers are more strongly influenced by soil moisture and not by our harmful farming practices!
What the each group of worm results will tell us
Epigeic worms tell us if there is sufficient plant material remaining on or near the surface of the soil for these worms to feed and hide in and thus survive. Intensive cultivation, clearing of crop debris and long periods of bare soil often result in a reduction of these numbers and so less organic matter is made available to soil dwelling organisms and the soil ecosystem begins to break down..
Endogeic worms do a lot of the mixing of the soil and making nutrients available where the roots are growing. These are usually the last group of worms to decline in a soil.
Anecic worms feed on leaf litter at night and pull leaves and organic debris from the surface down into the earth. When the soil is dug their permanent burrows are disrupted and frequent digging often causes a decline in their numbers and a subsequent loss of aeration and drainage channels in the soil. It may be that the teams that practice minimum dig (Teams 1-4) and using green manures (Team 3-4) will have higher numbers of certain types of worms. All this will be revealed by the data we collect.
For further information, see Mariko White. What can worms tell us about our soils? (Hampshire and Isle of wight Wildlife Trust. Published online 31.7.2019).
Community farming Down Under
On a recent trip to New Zealand, Julie and Andrew visited some local community gardens. Read what they found – and how much connects us from one side of the world to another.
Waimarama Community Gardens, Nelson, South Island, New Zealand
In January – February this year, we took a trip to South Island, New Zealand. It was a long-held ambition to see this country, but also, we had a standing invite to stay with some old friends, now resident in Nelson, at the northern end of South Island.
After a few days being shown around the Nelson area, which includes amazing beaches, and several national Parks, most notably Abel Tasman National Park, we were let loose and paid a casual visit to Waimarama Community Gardens, which we had seen signposted in Nelson town.
Established 23 years ago – the gardens were quite a hotchpotch on first sight, set just below the hills above Nelson and at the start of the 175kms-long Great Taste Trail, a food and drink walking/cycling trail, presumably for wobbly cyclists. (One for next time!). The edges of the site were more overgrown, blending into the local vegetation, and a sort of organised chaos reigned.
During our visit to the Nelson area, we were lucky with warm and sunny weather, with lots of birds singing, and cicadas chirruping as soon as the day warmed up.
There was a huge amount that was very familiar at Waimarama: various huts and sheds consisting of a seed shed, a sales area, wormery, a posh clay-brick compost toilet (very envious of this!) and community shed; IBCs (yes, they are everywhere) taking rain from shed roofs; a Rota Board of tasks – advising volunteers of Wednesday and Saturday tasks; and numerous individual small plots being tended by plot-holders busily watering.
Seemingly, IBCs are the solution where ever you go. Collecting rainwater for the plants is even more critical in Nelson than the UK because the South Island of New Zealand is in its third year of drought.
Although we had turned up unannounced, we were lucky to be pointed in the direction of Sally (family from Somerset originally), who was about to show round a potential new recruit, an amazingly knowledgeable teenage girl who was very keen to learn and hoped to become a regular volunteer. Her family home had only a yard for the dog and no plants.
Sally showed us some experimental Three Sisters Companion Planting which was thriving. If you haven’t heard of this, it seems to be a native American idea starting with sweetcorn, which provides the support for beans twining up the corn stems, with beans providing soil nitrate, surrounded by a ground layer of squash and courgettes suppressing weeds. We only knew of the Three Sisters idea after reading Braiding Sweet Grass, a book by American writer Robin Wall Kimmerer. Wonderful to see being put into practise – would it work in our rather cooler climate?
We also loved the individual chaotic plots which didn’t appear too rigidly planned but so good to see in their full summer glory. We were staggered by the flowers (lots of dahlias), herbs and vegetables, having left a cold English January.
Their Compost Club met on Saturdays and were making so much compost they had spread some surplus on adjacent waste ground and were growing squash.
Drowning pernicious weeds seems universal. Unfortunately, the worst weeds in New Zealand all seem to be from the UK!
We took their Facebook details and took our hasty leave of the community garden as the sandflies started to find us.
(Incidentally, a great Saturday event in Nelson is the Farmers market – stalls full of blueberries, raspberries and lots of produce grown nearby by small producers.)
Have you visited community growers elsewhere? Let us know what you found.