Crop Planning & Buying Garlic

Today is when I sit down at the computer to take our first thoughts on cropping and flesh them out in more detail.  It's a long way from being done, but every step forward gets us closer! Also, if you want to grow garlic, you're running out of time to plant it out so buy some soon and plant it asap.
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Pitching to Unltd at the Eden Project



Today we were invited to pitch our project to a panel of judges at The Eden Project, for the chance of £15,000 towards expanding our farm operations.  Even if we aren't selected it was a lovely sunny day to visit Eden, and it was lovely to spend time with so many interesting food projects in Devon and Cornwall.  Thanks to Tim for driving us down, and to all the other projects that wished us luck and commiserated on the bout of nerves prior to presenting!

Gratitude for snacks

You know when you’re working outside on a drizzly day and it’s time to come in for a cup of tea? How good that cup of tea feels? (amazing!) well today we didn’t only have tea we also had sweet peanut butter and chickpea squares given to me last night by Neeta.  Thank you Neeta! We played the ‘guess that taste’ game and still noone got it. 🙂
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Time to sign up CSA members again

After a bit of rewording from last year, and changing around some of the options, the membership forms are ready to go in Monday's CSA boxes.  I've even thrown in some pie charts to show where our money comes from and where it goes and a picture of the new machinery we're planning on using. A Sunday job jobbed. 🙂

Hooray for freebies!

Today I had some helpful support from Laurel (Food In Community) and Hannah (The Kitchen Table) to pickup some old outdoor tables that would've been skipped in a massive clearance of some old kit of Dartington Estates.  Next big event we have, we'll have no excuse not to have tables out for you! Deep gratitude for both ladies for generously donating their time today.  This is what community supporting their farm looks like. 🙂

Planning & Learning

Today was a day for catching up on emails at home, and getting organised for 2015.  I grabbed an app off the internet and used it to make an automatic gantt chart of all the things to do in the next few months including building stuff, ordering stuff, planning crops and preparing our beds for crops.  I also had a few texts from Mel who's up at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, which sounds amazing yet again – I'm definitely going to find a budget in my life to go up next year!

Global Perspective: Seed Sovereignty

Global Perspective: Seed Sovereignty
Seed is the source of life and as such it is ethically unjust that it can be owned by anyone let alone a individual companies. Farmers have created preserved and renewed seed diversity through conservation and selection for thousands of years. They have the right to save, breed and exchange seed, further diversifying the genetic pool and creating land races that are locally and culturally appropriate.

Seed sovereignty has grown as an international movement to combat the onslaught of the cumulative negative effects of seed patenting. Although the patenting of seeds was first permitted under the USA Plant Patent Act of 1930, it was not until the 80’s that living cells were eligible for the same protection under international property laws which paved the way for Monsanto to patent the first Genetically Modified plant cell in 1982, and subsequently all plants got a similar treatment in 1985.

Patents threaten these fundamental rights by creating monopolies on seed. They can lead to cycles of debt  for farmers who are sold ‘terminator seeds’ developed with the aim of creating sterile seed, ensuring that the farm MUST return to buy new seed annually. Further more the potential for GM seed to contaminate crops had lead corporations to sue farmer for theft of property.

New European Commission legislation (May 2013) on plant reproductive material has worsened the situation. It will make it illegal to market any unregistered seed, illegal to sell or even give seed away for free. Registering seed will be unaffordable for anyone apart from big business, and criteria such as ‘stability’ and ‘uniformity’ supports the production of hybrid seed, rather than producing seed that is acclimatised to local conditions. This will be devastating for seed diversity, seriously reducing the varieties of crops grown and is a direct attack on the rights of famers.  Luckily amateur growers and small businesses are exempt from regulation, making our role in seed saving all the more important.

Read more about seed sovereignty on these websites: Land Workers Alliancethe Ecologist, the campaign for Seed Sovereignty and Navdanya