Growing

Forest GardenOur last Frome Food and Land Group visit of the year was to Lydford Forest Gardens. This is a 1/4 acre community garden project in the village of West Lydford. The garden was created as a millenium project and is based on permaculture forest garden principles.

Discovery ApplesWe recently harvested the first few apples from our orchard planted in early 2008 (see tree planting pictures). These apples are Discovery, one of the best early eaters.

On Sunday 14th June members of Food Frome visited the Torganics Community Supported Agriculture project at Paddington Farm near Glastonbury. We were amazed to see how much Colum Pawson and the local volunteers have managed to achieve in just one season.

Potatoes in BucketsPotatoes from a BucketThis year we grew some early new potatoes in buckets. This allowed us to get an earlier crop as we were able to protect them in early spring. The pictures show a couple of the buckets growing and the amount of potatoes we got from one bucket. As the potato variety is International Kidney (the same variety as Jersey Royals) we decided to call these Mendip Royals!

Protecting BroccoliProtecting young purple sprouting broccoli plants from aphids and larger ones from cabbage white butterfly caterpillars is hard work

The enclosed photo of a Frome allotment shows a raised bed protected by a large sheet of fleece, carefully anchored round the bed, to prevent the butterflies from laying the eggs that hatch into caterpillars, and a few French marigolds to make a nasty smell to keep the aphids away. We shall see what will happen.

On Sunday members of Food Frome and Sustainable Frome, led by Des Harris, visited Simpson's Seeds (www.simpsonsseeds.co.uk) in the old walled garden at Longleat.

Simpson's Seeds are a small family-run nursery, they mainly grow vegetable seeds and plants and specialise in chillis and tomatoes.

Matt Simpson gave us a tour of the nursery and explained some of the history. The walled garden was built in 1756 and continued to produce fruit and vegetables for the Longleat estate until World War II when it was taken over by the Ministry of Food.

These pictures show an apple tree before and after pruning. An Apple-tree pruning day was organised Helen Johnstone of the Sustainable Frome Apple group and led by Peter Macfadyen. The tree concerned is in the orchard of local varieties at the Millennium Green in Frome. The Apple Group plans to celebrate Apple Day in October.

Before
After

Recently Food Frome visited Mike and Sarah Benson at Barrow Farm. For information about PYO soft fruit, vegetables and other products see www.barrowfarm.com. More pictures here.

A visit to Innox Hill allotments in Frome on June 8th 2008. More pictures here.