This first summer is mostly about setting up but hopefully there will be plants in the ground before long and veggies to harvest before the autumn. If you’d like to help as a volunteer it would be great to welcome you to the site and see what you’d like to do.
Big jobs
- Putting up a polytunnel. It’ll be especially helpful to have lots of people around when it’s time to put the cover on, but for now the holes to anchor the poles are still being dug.
- Making ‘no dig’ veggie beds with cardboard, mulch and muck. And then planting and sowing in them as soon as possible!
- Fencing the veggie plot. It would be great to have no fence at all but with deer regularly visiting the field and a hare seemingly living here we need to protect the veggies. The plan is to fence a corner of the field with a low-ish deer fence using timber poles and a low-vis mesh.
- Water water! There’s plenty at the bottom of the field but none at the top. The plan is to harvest rainwater for most of our needs and we also need to test our solar-powered pump so we can top up from the wet area if we need to.
wildlife jobs
- Setting up a wildlife camera. We’ve got one somewhere and it would be great to get it set up in the fen area near Scalford Brook so we can see who’s making all the tracks that criss-cross the space down there.
- Making a ‘dead hedge’ outside the veggie plot by gathering sticks and brush from around the field. This will probably be a summer-long job but it’ll be worth it because it will create new habitat for birds, invertebrates and small mammals and also help protect the veggies and polytunnel from the prevailing wind.
- Surveying the trees. It would be useful to map the trees by the brook and in the hedgerows so we know what species we have and what else we might plant to grow the copse and create an orchard.
- Trying out a moth trap. Let’s see who’s fluttering around at night when the humans are off to bed!