Showing posts with label Fenland Smallholders Club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fenland Smallholders Club. Show all posts

Saturday 1 February 2020

Fenland Smallholders Club lives on.

This past Sunday was a big day for me.
It was the AGM of the Fenland Smallholders Club and, after two years at the helm, I was stepping down as Chair.
But there was a big problem. There was no sign of anyone being willing to take over the mantle. There was a real danger that the club would fold after over forty years.

The club had been in a similar precarious situation before I took on the role of Chair, so my tenure had just bought a little time.  Of course, I could just stay on as Chair if no one else came forward, but this was a bit like a game of chicken. If I gave way and showed any hint of being willing to carry on then it was sure that nobody would stand and we would be in exactly the same position this time in 2021. Besides, there are over 200 members in the club so it is unfair for one person to be forced into a position because of others' inertia.

This is of course a situation which many clubs and small organisations across the country find themselves in. The digital age brings some great benefits, but actual personal contact and going out to meetings and events has suffered as a result. It was I who started up the Facebook group for members of the club and I have sometimes wondered if that may have contributed to members' apathy. It is all too easy to hit the like button and somehow feel you are doing your bit to support the club. But there have been huge benefits of the Facebook group too. Especially for newer smallholders, it means they don't have to spend time building up a network of people to call and they don't have to wait several weeks to ask someone's opinion at a meeting. Answers on the internet are instant, even if often at odds with each other. Facebook has also provided the club with a great means of marketing and a huge pool of potential members. The days of turning up at agricultural shows and country fayres with a club stand are long gone.

But nor should the past be left behind and forgotten. Fenland Smallholders Club has always been slightly quirky and slightly old-fashioned. In my time on committee I have tried to drag it kicking and screaming into the current century, but it has often been an uphill struggle against a tide of conservatism.  Occasionally, when I am feeling mischievous, I bring up the subject of veganism. That gets things kicking off!!!

But the old timers have much to teach us. Many members, including ourselves, have come from city life and come with idealised views about rural life. Jumping in at the deep end soon brings you back to reality and the smallholding learning curve is a steep one. But at the same time there is a balance to be struck. Many countryside attitudes are indeed ill informed and need challenging.
You've only got to look at the all too common attitude that any uninvited plant or creature needs to be destroyed. The indiscriminate use of chemicals which came in after the war has decimated our wildlife and left our ecosystems in tatters.
But I would like to think that smallholding harks back to a time before industrial, monocultural farming and that it can provide some sort of model for the future. I'm not saying that every single person can be expected to own a piece of land and spend much of their time producing their own food. Most people wouldn't want to, but that's no excuse for accepting the way things have gone.

So, back to the Fenland Smallholders Club. We still have meetings at least every other month. We have a buddy scheme where an incredible range of members' knowledge and experience can be accessed. We have subgroups for Grow-Your Own, Cheesemaking, Winemaking and Wool Crafts. We have an annual duck order for members and we have a cheap seed scheme. And if all that wasn't enough, members get an excellent bimonthly magazine too.
We try to do whatever we can to support members, both practically and socially.
Smallholding can be a lonely pursuit. In fact most smallholders are fiercely independent people. So having the opportunity to meet up with other smallholders is probably the most valuable thing the club offers.
Yes, we have a Facebook page, a website and even a Twitter account, but it's that face to face contact, the interest and education that our meetings offer which is the real draw.

But we are like the village pub and the high street, constantly facing an uphill struggle to keep going. Everyone bemoans our disappearance but few people see that active, practical support is needed to keep these institutions going.
I may sound old here, but these days people want to have their cake and eat it and that is not always possible.

So this post has been a balance of nostalgic pessimism and forward-thinking optimism and that ability to balance past and future, to move with the times but with an eye to the best of tradition and the past, is the key to the survival for clubs like Fenland Smallholders Club.

Well, I've wandered and rambled right off the path!
Back to last Sunday and the AGM.
There was a real danger that the club would fold due to the membership as a whole being too apathetic to take responsibility for it. I know that sounds harsh but that's the way I see it and now that I am no longer Chair I don't have to be quite so diplomatic (not a strength of mine anyway!)
But the people who do care turned up and restored some of my faith in human nature. There was a genuine banging together of heads to come up with a solution. I had been expecting a bumpy meeting, but almost everybody's contributions were positive and it really came across how valued the club is.
Everybody has busy lives which don't always go to plan. Sometimes we go through really sticky patches where we seem to be trudging through mud. But if lots of people can get involved then the responsibility can be shared and running the club can actually be a joy rather then a burden.
Fortunately just enough people, with a little cajoling, were willing to step up to the mark.

Even more importantly, we do now have a new Chair. More than that, we have our first ever female Chair (strictly speaking, club rules and most members still like to use the word Chairman, but I insist on dropping the man bit off the end!). This was a huge relief. To see the club fold would have been absolutely tragic.
I will of course be staying very involved and doing everything I can to make sure the new Chair feels supported and not burdened.

At the end of the day it is about community and everybody taking a bit of responsibility for the mutual benefit of all.

Long live Fenland Smallholder Club!

Monday 21 January 2019

Super Blood Wolf Moon Hug Day!

It's International Hug Day and the rest of the family are really getting into it!


It's also the start of Energy Saving Week, though I think the impending headlong dive into catastrophic climate change maybe demands slightly more than an awareness week!

Onto smallholding matters and Saturday saw the Beginners Grow Your Own group round for our third meeting. This is something I run for members of Fenland Smallholders Club.
The chickens enjoy pecking at broken ice,
even though it's not really the weather for lollies!
A chilly but still morning saw us outside clearing the asparagus patch and making a start on cutting back last year's summer-fruiting raspberry stems. The aim is that I get a little help and that, by actually doing the tasks, the group learn practically.

Asparagus patch
Before and after a long overdue clearance

This was followed by a short introduction to fruit tree pruning.

Once we were wrapped up and working the weather wasn't actually too bad but it was nice to come into the warm where we looked at all the gubbins needed to raise your own veg plants from seed.

From next month it all starts to get a lot more real as seed sowing begins in earnest.

Sunday had me engaged in Smallholders Club business again as I had my first ever AGM to run as Chair. I hate having to do this sort of thing and really can't stand the formality.
Anyway, I got through it and we followed the formalities with a talk by one of our members on shooting for smallholders.


I doubt I will be getting a gun, but it really was very interesting. I felt a lot less nervous once the guns went away!




Back from the club meeting, there was time to clear out the duck stable before heading out for a walk with the dogs under a spectacular full moon.
This was a Super Blood Wolf Moon. There seems to have been a recent proliferation in descriptive moon names! At least it encourages a bit of awe and wonder at the world we live in and, to be fair, there was to be an eclipse much later on in the night.

Sunday 23 December 2018

wwww.Winter Weaving with Willow and Wool

Long, dark evenings
This time of year offers little time for outside work and I am often forced inside by darkness, if not by the weather. I get twitchy on the long winter evenings. I am no stranger to the odd soap opera or two, but I find it hard to sit doing nothing. So winter is a time for planning new outdoor projects and a time for evening crafts and hobbies.
This year I am aiming to teach myself basket weaving. Over the years I have been on a few basket-making courses. Each time I have come back with quite a decent basket and each time I have felt that I could never make another without considerable help from a tutor. But now I have taken the plunge and started to make baskets all on my own. I have only made a couple so far, one from a book and one from a YouTube video. I am still at the stage of trying to blindly follow instructions and mistakes happen. But here are my two efforts.

Not perfect, but still useable.

Basket-weaving is a good hobby for me. I love working with natural materials and I love mathematical patterns. I also have umpteen uses for baskets.


A Holt of my own
So in my usual all or nothing style I have ordered 25 different varieties of willow to grow my own willows for basketry. I didn't know this before but such a willow plantation is known as a holt. At the moment my holt is merely a forest of little sticks lined up and poking out above a sea of landscape fabric. This is a necessary evil to keep competition from grasses and weeds down. I have gone for the thin fabric type rather than the thicker plastic type which shreds strand upon strand of plastic.
The whole is weighed down with old bricks, stones, planks and water-filled bottles. This stops the fabric flapping and tearing or lifting up and damaging the buds of the willow cuttings.


There are over 400 varieties of willow. Those suitable for basketry produce long, straight shoots if grown close together and coppiced every year. Some produce thin rods for fine basketwork, others thicker rods for more agricultural baskets. The range of colours is wonderful, browns, greens, reds, yellow, even blues and blacks.
They are supplied as cuttings, each about 25 to 30cm long. These are just poked into the ground and should pretty much all take root. It will be a couple of years before I am getting a decent harvest.

Until then I will have to purchase most of the willow rods for my developing basketmaking, though I have been cutting back some of my willows which I grow for living willow projects. The thinner sticks and some of the branches rods will be suitable for basket practice. Here they are sorted and ready for drying. Some of the rods will make excellent basket handles or frames for starting baskets.


Short Rotation Coppice
I have also planted an area of fast growing willows for Short Rotation Coppice (SRC). This is grown for biomass, either for burning or for chipping for mulch or to bulk up the compost heap. I should have started all these projects years ago, but I opted for ash trees instead as they are the common local species and are excellent for fire wood. However, the saplings were planted the year before the advent of Ash dieback and have not grown anywhere near as well as they should have, being severely knocked back every year. Unfortunately, tree planting is a long term project.


While I have been working with willow, Sue has been busy with wool. She is a member of the Woolly Crew, a subgroup of Fenland Smallholders Club. Each month they meet and share their crafts. Sue has been using the fleeces from our Shetland sheep for felting and for peg-looming.
There is a very practical side to this as she is busy making rugs for our tipi.

On the left you can see her efforts at incorporating Boris into a new rug design!



Sue has also been preparing a fleece for tanning. This is the fleece from the last sheep we sent off. Sue has been salting the skin for a few weeks and it is now ready to go to the tannery. We could attempt this ourselves but it uses some pretty nasty chemicals and it is difficult to achieve a good result. The tannery we are sending the fleece to is an organic tannery and hopefully the returned fleece will make it all worth it.

Meanwhile winter evenings are for snuggling up warm and cosy too.



Friday 23 November 2018

The Very Best of Fenland Smallholders Club



My weekend was devoted to Fenland Smallholders Club.

Saturday 17th November 2018
Our first Beginners Grow Your Own Group
Once a month for the next ten months I am leading a Beginners' Grow Your Own Group. Today was our first meeting.
Before we got started on my tour of the veg plot, the orchard, the soft-fruit area and the nuttery, I had a plan to get our caravan moved. We had parked it up on the gravel driveway and Sue and I just couldn't get it moved on our own. Many hands made light work.
We hope to use this caravan to house volunteers if we can attract them to spend time here on the smallholding with us.

I am initially running the BGYO group as a ten session course and hope to give people all the skills they need to become pretty much self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables (unless they fancy the odd banana and orange!)
There are a range of participants, all smallholders, ranging from complete novices who are about to embark on setting up for growing food to others who have been doing it for years but want to extend their activities.

For this first session I tried to focus on the big picture such as choosing a site, deciding how to arrange beds and where to place perennial and annual beds. We looked at issues such as water supply, placing sheds, climate and microclimate and options for indoor growing.

Time flew past. I fed everybody with a couple of soups I had knocked up using one of my many pumpkins and bade farewell.

I still had some of the afternoon and evening to embark on my first ever basket-making without a tutor to guide me. I started with a basic basket which I had made before on courses. I made a couple of beginner mistakes, but overall the techniques came back to me. In fact, without a tutor to rely on I learned a lot more when I had to figure things out for myself.

It's all coming back to me now



I would dearly love to have another go straight away, but unfortunately the willow needs soaking for several days.

Sunday 18th November 2018
Preserving Day




Sunday was the main Smallholders Club meeting, for which Sue had done most of the organisation. We set off early and managed to get into the village hall in good time to set everything up. The day started with a talk by Sue on using a dehydrator. Her notes for the talk were on the equivalent of an old-fashioned fag packet, much to the amusement of others. Sometimes our teaching skills come in very useful.

After the talk there were about ten tables covering all aspects of preserving which club members kindly ran. There was onion stringing, eco-wraps, fermenting, jam and chutney, freezing, vinegars and cordials, bottling, sausage-making... everything you could want to know. We also had a jam-swap, which with hindsight I should have named the Jam-boree. This worked really well and will become an annual occurrence.





Lastly the pumpkin soup left from yesterday made a very popular appearance on the refreshments stand, alongside cakes, pizza and cheese scones which others had brought along. That one Crown Prince squash, with just a few onions and leeks and a small packet of sweet potato, had made three large pans of soup and provided about twenty five warming lunches. It had made a fair bit of money for the club too. 

One particular nice moment was to see Steve, a professional gardener, mentoring one of our younger members in the art of onion stringing. A bonus for Sue and I too as we got all our onions strung and all our garlic plaited. And that was that. 


A very busy weekend which hopefully lots of people learned a lot from and enjoyed.

Saturday 27 October 2018

I Finally Got To An Apple Pressing Day

Saturday 13th October 2018
26 degrees! Holbeach is setting all-time temperature records yet again.
So far as rare birds are concerned, the weather patterns this autumn have meant one thing  - there haven't been any, which is a relief in a way since the car is poorly and might not make too many long journeys. It has also rendered my life somewhat more uncomplicated.

The reason I mention this is that for the last three years I have managed to miss the Smallholders Club Apple Pressing day. Not this year though. I actually managed to show my face.

One of the club members kindly opens up his orchard so even those without their own apples can pick their own windfalls. Others bring along apple presses and scratters (an apple crushing / chopping device).
The whole process was very friendly and many hands certainly made light work. In fact I spent most of my time chatting while Sue got on with turning our bagfuls of apples into delicious cartons of fresh juice. Even the apple pulp doesn't go to waste as the poultry very much appreciate it.

Under the blue skies it really was a very delightful day.

Equipment set up, windfalls collected

Apples going into the scratter



Fruit presses in action

Chickens on the prowl
While we were there we took up a friend's offer of some spare quinces he had along with a few bags of sweet chestnuts. It was lovely to visit his smallholding for the first time too. Like us he started with a blank canvas but his plot has been maturing and developing for a few years longer than ours.

Quince jelly on the boil

Friday 24 August 2018

Going. Going. Gone!

Sunday 12th August 2018
Going Going Gone


Today saw us helping to organise an auction of smallholding goods. An ex member of the Smallholders Club is taking the envious step of moving to West coast Scotland, though they will no longer be smallholding. They kindly offered club members an exclusive auction.
There was all sorts, from a mini tractor to old tools, trailers to plant pots, pig arks to chicken fencing. Sue played auctioneer for the day and enjoyed the power of wielding the gavel.
I was quite restrained with my purchases, though I did come away with a few unexpected purchase, which I was able to transport in the trailer I bought! Not a perfect one, but good enough for collecting hay and straw from down the road. Best of all, it came full of horse manure which went straight onto the compost heap.



And in case you are wondering, Sue is currently arranging to have the boat transported into her school playground for the children to play on.
There was also a rather special outdoor table and bench, carved from a single oak log, which I had admired at this property since I first visited about five years ago. Needless to say, we are now trying to arrange to have that transported to our place too.
If the plan comes off I'll show you pictures.

Thursday 28 June 2018

Dozens of Ducklings.

Saturday 23rd June 2018
A big day today. 170 Ducklings arriving!


Before that, the lambs needed worming and moving down to the main paddocks, where they disappeared in the long grass.
One benefit of the constant dry weather is that mowing the lawns becomes a much less onerous task. It only took a couple of hours today to do the whole lot. Job done.

Still the day passed quickly and at 3pm the ducklings arrived in three poultry crates in the back of a car. Making the arrangements to get them here had been a bit tricky, especially when we had to delay everything because of the winter bird flu restrictions.



The plan was that we would be keeping 16 for ourselves, mostly for meat but maybe keeping a couple of females to join us more permanently and bolster our duck egg production. The rest were to be picked up by other smallholders from Fenland Smallholders Club. I was making no profit from these, just organising it for the benefit of the club.

It was novel having 170 ducklings in the stable for a while. They were completely comical.  They were hungry and thirsty!


It was lovely to welcome a string of other smallholders to the smallholding too.
Once all the ducklings had been picked up, we actually had 20  left. I expect you had already counted that there were 174 and not 170!

With all the excitement over, we headed over into Northamptonshire for a bat and moth night. We got to use bat detectors for the first time, which brought glimpses of bats to life. Then we headed along the dark tracks of the woodland to meet up with some mothers (pronounced with an "o" and not an "u"). Unbelievably it was the first time I had seen a moth trap in action. The moths were intriguing and I could have spent much longer here but I did not know my way out of the woods! I can definitely see myself doing more of this in the future.
A big bonus was finding lots of glow-worms. I had completely forgotten they had been mentioned as a possibility when I spotted a faint glow from deep within the vegetation by the path. Everybody else had walked past it. About 30 yards further on I found another, then other people started finding them. The best was one which just sat on the path affording the opportunity to see the creature itself and not just the glow from its bum (technical entomological term). They look like a giant ladybird larva.

We were back on the farm at about 1am. I poked my head in on the ducks which were all huddled together in a pile.

Sunday 13 May 2018

The War On Slugs

Saturday 28th April 2018

The War Against Slugs
I made some new slug traps today from old plastic food pots. I am having a concerted attack on the blighters this year, using these techniques:
Night time hunts
Placing planks on the ground so the slugs shelter there during the day
Ducks - now living in the veg plot
Slug traps - filled with beer slops or, failing that, a sugar and yeast mix
Slug pellets - ferrous phosphate, organic and wildlife friendly (except slugs)
It is a battle which requires prolonged and sustained effort.




A New Home for the Table Birds

Next I moved the chicks from the broody ring in the garage. They have very quickly outgrown their space. They were very excited to discover the great outside, but even more excited by their new feeders!





Doing my bit to build a community
In the evening we had a local group of smallholders coming over. This is a group I started up as part of the Fenland Smallholders Club. We had a lovely evening and I am sure the group will go from strength to strength over the years. Everybody lives within a short distance of each other which means we should be able to coordinate some of our smallholding activities. Hopefully friendships will form and we will all be able to help each other out when we need it.

Sunday 6 May 2018

The Big Day Arrives

Saturday 21st April 2018
The Big Day

The biggest day so far in my tenure as Chair of the Fenland Smallholders Club. I am trying to usher in a new era of involvement, sharing and enthusiasm. 
Today I had asked the Grow Your Own group which I founded a few years back to help me lay on a meeting all about growing your own veg. 
We started with  a game I had devised where teams had to decide which of 5 was not a potato. No team made it intact past the third round! The point of this game was to show just how many varieties there are compared to what you see in your average supermarket.
The game was a good icebreaker and was the best way I could explain to members and to the rest of the committee how I want the club to feel.
I followed this up with an activity where everybody was a vegetable (some had to be pests too). We organised ourselves into perennials, polytunnel crops and others. The others then organised themselves into families. As usual, turnips and swedes went into the root crops and the newbie veg growers were surprised to discover that they actually belong with the cabbages. Next the pests attacked. Everybody moved round one and this was enough to befuddle some of the pests. (I resisted the temptation to throw an actual net over the brassica group).

The activity was designed as a demonstation of why we rotate crops. 

Next up were the display and activity tables where people got to talk to members of the Grow Your Own group in more detail. We covered crop rotation, pests and diseases and no-dig gardening. There was a Seed swap and a seedling sale, as well as soil testing and seed planting for children.
Soil testing
Seed Swap
Starting young
All of this, plus refreshments in the form of cakes and savouries all containing vegetables. 

We finished with me showing everybody my yet to be patented seed storage system and a Veg Gardeners Question Time.

The day absolutely flew by and it didn't seem like five minutes before we were hastily packing everything away and heading back home again. The day had been a great success. Attendance had been good, especially considering the fine weather alternatives, and it was great to see quite a few new faces come along. Hopefully they were impressed enough to come back another time.

As soon as I got home I got straight into the garden. There is a month's worth of catching up to do and the forecast is back to miserable again.
What with everything else, this week's record-breaking hot weather has been a missed opportunity for me and I need to grab every moment and every opportunity to catch up.

So it was in with the Second Early Potatoes, in with the parsnip seeds, in with carrot seeds. A quick bit of rotavating while the soil was dry enough and before I knew it darkness was falling.

Saturday 5 May 2018

Flash Recovery

Finally a heatwave is on the cards.
Time to go back to work after a cold, soggy and breezy Easter holiday. Typical.

Wednesday 18th April 2018
Sue and the dogs looking after Flash

Temperatures hit 23 degrees today and are forecast for even higher tomorrow. The soil will be workable for the first time in a long time. At the same time, the grass will need cutting and the weeds will be growing.
Everything will be playing catch-up. But not me. Not only am I back at work, but I have a very big day coming up on Saturday.
For it is my first meeting as Chair of the Smallholders Club and, along with the Grow Your Own group, we have a very busy event planned. I have talks and games to prepare for and display tables to get ready, as well as food to prepare for catering.
It will take up all my evenings and the whole of Saturday.
I don't really mind, but the timing on the weather could not have been worse. Not only are my hands completely tied as soon as I could get out and making proper progress in the veg plot, but the first sunny weekend of the year is sure to keep people away from the event which is taking up all my time to organise.
After Saturday, the forecast is for thunderstorms on Sunday before a return to cold and grey again!

Enough moaning though. Life is still pretty good.

Flash has continued to worry us. He is not bouncing around like a week old lamb should be. For the first few days of his life we felt that every day we could keep him alive his chances of survival would be increasing. But he is still not strong in his legs. He totters about stiffly and struggles to get up when he has been sitting. Most of his time he spends just sitting. Last night he really struggled to stand on the straw in the stable, but this morning he was looking stronger than ever.


Thursday 19th April 2018
Scorcher!
It was 29 degrees today. Not Fahrenheit! The thermometer in the polytunnel hit 120. This brings its own problems for the delicate little seedlings in their pockets of compost.
Dentist.
This has been worrying me for quite some time so the hour long delay in the waiting room was most unwelcome. I survived, but only because they did no work today!
A Visit to the Vets
After that, we had arranged to take Flash to see the vet all the way over in Norfolk.
He started out in a cat carrier, but quickly ended up cuddled in on Sue's lap. Like us, the vet could find no obvious problems, but administered antibiotics (just for luck) and an anti-inflammatory.
It was like a miracle. Within five minutes fFash was able to hop over the step of the vets without stumbling or falling onto his face.
By the time we got him home he was trotting up and down in his pen and by the next morning he was running up and down with me and Rambutan.

Friday 20th April 2018
Work and final preparations for the meeting. Parsnip Cake and Butternut Galette.

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