Community Allotment News
We’ve hosted 2 Thursday volunteer days now at our community fruit garden & allotment at Noxon Farm and plan to continue every Thursday.
Massive thanks and well done to everyone who’s come along and got involved in digging, weeding, and cobbing the greenhouse (an eco-build technique) see pics below.
Allotment life - After discovering a rat problem we asked our friendly local rat catcher Rob to pop over and check out the issue. He found the holes straight away and advised us not to move the veg bed in question as this causes panic in the rats, then they scatter and nest in different places!
We’d rather not use poison, but as this isn’t our land and we don’t have the option to deal with them other ways, as we would if we were living on and managing our own land, so with regret poison has been put down in boxes and Rob will come back to check again next week - thanks Rob 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Cobbing - Check out pics of our volunteers mixing the cobbing material - straw, water and clay & sand into a paste to spread into the gaps in the greenhouse to reinforce and insulate. We will be continuing with this, also using glass jars to creat more light and mass. So come along and help out if you want to learn more.
Pulmonia officinalis lungwort - The purple flowers you see below, are out now, great for butterflies and bees but also has medicinal uses for lungs and is edible.
Lamium album White dead nettle - is good plant for wildlife and has medicinal uses for women’s health relieve period problems and is full of vitamin a and minerals
Glechoma hederacea Ground ivy - also purple - The fragrant leaves of Ground-ivy once made it a popular bittering agent for beer until Hops eventually replaced it. Beneficial for wildlife as good source for pollinators.
Nettles - Who needs spinach flown in from Italy or Spain when we have this amazing nutritious and sustainable plant in abundance at this time of year. You can use gloves or just grasp the nettle to take the tips and vibrant leaves for your soups and pesto’ s. As soon as the leaves are crushed or cooked they loose their sting!
We would really like to build an awning for a our volunteers to have a dry area to process food and run workshops from. We’ve taught people pruning and grafting here in the past - but all weather dependant.
It would be nice to teach foraging, fermenting, brewing (lots of apples to process in autumn)
We supply most of the materials ourselves, like wood from our social forestry project and local tree surgeons provide wood chip for mulching and compost creation but there are always additional things to buy like tools and supplying our dedicated volunteers with tea ☕️ & biscuits 🍪 and the canvas for an awning is pretty pricey, so we really appreciate any donations to help us keep running.