Okay, its not your classic headline, but that would be ours for this month!
Thank you so much to everyone who came to our Family Farm Safari in May and to our Evening Farm Walk this month. We hosted over 100 people on the two visits and raised just over £500 for the Friends of Foxton School! We loved hosting everyone and talking about the challenges and opportunities on farm, discussing their questions and comparing to Clarksons Farm – all good stuff. On the 8th June, we also headed to Allerton in Leicestershire (where I work) to help host an Open Farm Sunday event there, where 331 people came. Great to see so much interest in food and farming.
Sheep! Anyone who has walked down the track round the farm in Foxton in the last fortnight will have noticed we have some wooly incomers. I know this because where I sit in my office, I can see everyone stop and have a look! The 25 sheep and lambs belong to George, who started working with Tom and Peter in March. They (and maybe some more friends soon) will graze the grass round the farm as well as the cover crops in winter. Their poo will provide valuable organic matter to the soil and they will reduce our requirement for glyphosate as they will eat some of the cover crops down. We might even put them in some of the cereal crops in autumn/winter, as this can help with disease control. If you leave them there too long though……they just eat it all, expect tense/exciting times ahead. We are really excited to have livestock on the farm and we hope they will play a useful part as we look to adopt more regenerative practices. And also some tasty lamb. Also in the words of my 5 year old niece “now you’re a proper farm”.
Other than that, thanks to some much-needed rain at the end of May/early June the crops are looking well and “holding on” (technical term, basically means not dying yet) okay. We could do with some more, particularly for some of the winter bird food mixes that Tom drilled this month. Here, plants are grown that provide a lot of seed for birds in winter (when there is less about elsewhere). As they have only just been planted, they need more water and will struggle without any more rain.
With the dry weather, we are expecting an early harvest, so I am fully expecting the “Harvest Twitch” to be making an appearance soon…! Watch this space.
Weather request: Bit more rain in June please, then no rain.