Pick, pick, pick… we’ve harvested a record number of apples for our annual Cornish apple juicing event next Sunday.

Our team of adults and children filled every container available with this year’s huge glut of fruit from our adopted orchard in St Mabyn.

Some of the apple trees in the garden and old orchard are really quite unusual. They include delicious dessert varieties like Lord Hindlip and Gascoyne’s Scarlet as well as the familiar cooker Bramley’s Seedling and the cider apple Tom Putt.

Many thanks to apple pickers Aimee, Brooke, Charlotte, Fiona, Jerry, Lani, Lily, Mark M, Mike S, Paul, Ros, Sammy, Shayne and Teresa, whose joint efforts were rewarded with large quantities of homemade Westcountry apple cake.

The best of the dessert specimens and some of the cookers will go in Camel CSA’s veg boxes next week. The rest will be turned into apple juice at our juicing fest.

This is happening next Sunday 17 October from 10 am – 12.30 pm on Camel CSA’s vegetable plot next to St Kew Harvest Farm Shop, at St Kew Highway in north Cornwall.

It follows the success of last year’s event which involved lots of families. Everyone will be able to join in washing, cutting up, crushing and pressing the apples. Age is no barrier!

You’ll also have the opportunity to taste the different varieties of apples on Sunday. It’s just one of many Apple Day events taking place across the country.

This year we’ve managed to borrow three traditionally-made Vigo hand-operated apple presses and crushers, all of which require a team of volunteers to operate them.

It’s a great opportunity to get to know fellow members and local food enthusiasts. So please do come along and join in the fun.

Big excitement! The first of our three big new polytunnels is on order and should be on our site at St Kew Highway in a couple of weeks. It’ll arrive just in time to house all the winter salad crops we’ve been sowing.

It’s also time to pick our delicious Cornish apples. We’re harvesting them this coming Sunday from the old farm orchard we’ve adopted in the nearby village of St Mabyn.

The most delicious variety – Lord Hindlip – will go in Camel CSA’s veg boxes next week. The rest will be crushed and pressed into apple juice. This will happen on Sunday 17 October on our veg plot next to St Kew Harvest Farm Shop.

We do hope you’ll come and get stuck in at our annual juicing event. It’s an outdoor activity that’s suitable for all ages. And, as our hard-working press gang discovered at last year’s juicing fest, it’s really good fun!

Our veg box picking and packing team got soaked through this morning as they dug carrots and harvested sweetcorn in torrential Cornish rain.

The carrots were so muddy they had to be washed by hand under the outside tap. No fun in such a steady downpour!

Grateful thanks to volunteer picking and packing supremo Trish and her team – Anne, Mike S, Penny and Robert. They deserve the celebratory drink we’re all planning in the St Kew Inn tonight.

The growing team has been busy sowing winter salad seed. So far we’ve planted corn salad and rocket, as well as two varieties of both mustard and mizuna. They’ll go into the new polytunnel we’re about to construct on our full two-acre site at St Kew Highway.

Our local food initiative in north Cornwall is entering a very exciting new development phase. So watch this space closely over the next few weeks!

We’ve been busy tidying up the plot at St Kew Highway in anticipation of our big expansion on to the full two acres of land.

All the ragwort’s been pulled up, dock leaves removed and ground levelled to make way for our first very own poly tunnel. 

Much of the rest of the area has been ploughed and sown with green manure to help improve the soil fertility over the winter months.

This Sunday our volunteer growing team will be sowing winter salad crops to go in the new poly tunnel as soon as it’s up.

If you’d like to get involved, please meet outside our packing shed at 10am. We’ll be there until 12 – 12.30pm. Wear stout boots, bring gloves and don’t forget to include a waterproof (just in case).

One of Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s veg box members is going all out to make local food work in north Cornwall.

Shayne House, co-founder of the Tea Appreciation Society, demonstrates in his blogpost Stuff the Supermarkets how to source food locally without going to a superstore. He says:

Everything in my stuffed marrow recipe excluding the balsamic vinegar was produced in Cornwall. If I ignore the salt, the rest of the food came from within a 15 mile radius of my home. My food miles were drastically reduced thanks to a number of fantastic local producers.

This is Shayne’s list of ingredients sourced locally in order to make stuffed marrow:

1 marrow – Camel Community Supported Agriculture vegetable box scheme, St Kew Highway
1 small onion finely chopped – Camel Community Supported Agriculture veg box
scheme
500g lean minced beef – Button Meats, Michaelstow
30g fresh white breadcrumbs – Malcolm Barnecutt Bakery
1 tbsp chopped parsley – Camel Community Supported Agriculture veg box scheme
1 tbsp chopped chives – Shayne’s garden
1 tsp balsamic vinegar – fail
sea salt to taste – Cornish Sea Salt Co, Porthkerris
1 egg beaten – Killibury Nursery, Wadebridge
250ml cheese sauce – cheese from Davidstow Creamery; milk from Bradley’s Dairy, Delabole; flour from The Cornish Mill & Bakehouse, St Newlyn East

The mounds of Swiss chard picked for our veg boxes this week could help prevent us developing type 2 diabetes, according to the British Medical Journal.

Researchers from Leicester University found that one and a half portions of green leafy vegetables every day could result in a significant 14 per cent risk reduction in getting the disease. You can see the BBC report on their findings here.

Green leafy veg include chard, spinach, cabbage, kale and lettuce – and are all found in abundance in Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s weekly veg boxes at different times of the year.

We British are far too stuck on our sickly sweet chocolate bars, as the silly row about the new Twix Fino has shown. But how many of you have tried the real food of the gods – Cornish raw chocolate pie?

The raw chocolate revolution started in the US and has gradually spread across the Atlantic. It’s being promoted as a superfood that has serious nutritional properties while at the same time tasting amazing and moreish.  

One of raw chocolate’s practising aficionados is Debby Fowler of Living Food of St Ives in Cornwall, who says:

Our raw chocolate pie is just that: RAW, uncooked and therefore retaining all the nutrients traditionally associated with cacao. It’s dairy free, gluten free, sugar free and therefore guilt free! It is also delicious and suitable for vegetarians, vegans, diabetics and anyone with a wheat or dairy intolerance.

For me it was a case of once tasted, forever smitten. And as the flavour is so intense, a little goes a very, very long way.

Living Food make their raw chocolate pies in Cornwall from uncooked cacao beans mixed with coconut butter, agarve, carob, yacon and lucuma, plus nuts, berries and natural flavourings. But absolutely no vegetable fat, milk or sugar.

The pies come in several different flavours – even chilli. They’re available from Living Food’s own shops in St Ives and Truro as well as via mail order, and from selected local outlets including St Kew Harvest Farm Shop here in north Cornwall.

The tender baby leeks in this week’s standard veg boxes deserved special treatment.

What better than a risotto of leeks and pancetta from Nigel Slater’s latest book Tender?

The leeks and the mixed French beans that accompanied them were cultivated by one of Camel CSA’s expert growers, Jeremy Brown of St Kew Harvest.

Ever since we began our weekly veg box scheme at Camel Community Supported Agriculture, we’ve taken a very relaxed attitude to the actual containers.

What we’ve done is to recycle assorted cardboard boxes and plastic crates that come our way – usually from farmers, wholesalers, market gardens, dairies… but often from the backs of shops, pubs and restaurants.

They’re nearly always the wrong size or shape and have a habit of getting squashed, broken or going walkabout. We’re constantly having to scrounge around for more.

So now we’ve decided to do something positive – but it will mean a bit more co-operation from our members.

We’re trialling some CarbonZero biodegradable jute containers from Cornish company GoJute, based at St Austell. We’re particularly interested in their jute hampers, which have bamboo handles.

If they turn out to be suitable for use as sustainable veg boxes the next step will be to work out how to allocate these to members, how to keep track of them, whether to charge a deposit and what to do if we don’t get them back.

We’re aware this approach could be fraught with difficulties. So suggestions welcome!

I should say that this knotty green problem is not unique.

Veg box giant Riverford Organic uses recyclable cardboard boxes which are always going AWOL. Earlier this year it offered a box amnesty to its customers. At the same time it failed to persuade them to overcome their resistance to reusable plastic crates, even though this would have led to a 70% reduction in CO2 emissions.

The battle of the supermarkets in the nearby town of Wadebridge, north Cornwall has developed an unexpected twist in the tale.

The possible presence of dormice, a European Protected Species, could put a stop to one of the three proposed out-of-town superstores.

Morrison’s wants to build its supermarket on the site of Wadebridge Town Football Club. It’s offering to provide a replacement ground, practice pitches, changing rooms, floodlights and car park in open countryside at Bodieve.

Sainsbury’s has applied to develop a superstore next to the council offices, while Tesco wants to expand its store on the west side of the town.

Unfortunately for Morrison’s, Cornwall Council planning officer Gavin Smith is recommending that permission for the football club plan be refused.

Interestingly, the fact that no dormice have been seen on the proposed new football club site is not the issue. Cornwall Wildlife Trust has recorded them nearby and it’s illegal to disturb this shy and delightful animal.

As a BBC blog post on the supermarket issue points out: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Significantly, Cornwall Council and the wildlife trust are partners in the Camel Valley Dormouse Project which has been calling for people to become “dormouse detectives” in the Wadebridge area. It’s encouraging local residents to hunt for nibbled hazelnut shells that have tell-tale toothmarks and a neat round hole on one side.

Dormouse picture: courtesy of David Chapman Wildlife Photography

Update: A decision on the planning application has been deferred to await the results of the dormice survey and to investigate “serious” concerns about noise from the football ground.

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