Mark N is ploughing, weeding, composting and raking the veg beds set aside for root veg – carrots, beetroot, fennel and parsnips.

In the meantime young plants in the seeding tunnel are growing well in the warm conditions and strong spring light.

Camel CSA’s growers joined forces with the growing team from Trevalon CSA on our vegetable-growing site in north Cornwall to share skills, ideas and challenges.

A big thank you to the Trevalon team – Mark, Rod, Tom, Zulu, Peot and Emma for coming to visit us on one of the last bitterly cold days of our Cornish “spring”. 

In the space of three hours we managed to fork over a couple of our long, narrow growing beds, remove most of the couch grass, spread a topping of compost and sow the first of the onion sets.

We also swapped experiences, ate cake and talked a great deal!

Thanks as well to our own growers – Mark N, Jane, Mike S, Mark M and Charlotte.

We’re holding an exciting programme of fun-filled summer holiday workshops for children. Three different sets of activities aimed at 4-11-year-olds start on Wednesday 15 August.

The action-packed sessions are led by workshop leader Diana Barry, also Camel CSA’s treasurer.

Diana says: “We’re aiming to help children understand exactly where their food comes from in a fun way. They’ll get to touch, smell and taste a variety of vegetables on our plot. They’ll learn how to recognise them, how to sow and grow and also how compost is made.”

Each workshop will run from 11am – 2pm (including break) on our vegetable-growing site at St Kew Highway.  The cost for each child is £4, which includes art materials, squash/water and fruit/snacks.

Wednesday 15 August – COOL AS A CUCUMBER
Tickle your taste buds! Try a variety of vegetables while blindfolded. Explore the site and discover about our environment during more hands-on fun activities

Thursday 23 August – WHAT’S ROTTING?
 Compost, marvellous compost! Examine it very closely and meet our specialists – the earthworms. Find out about the growth cycle of plants and how long it take for different things to decompose 

• Friday 24 August – READY, STEADY, GROW
Touch, feel and smell plants! Discover how to sow and grow. Learn how to take care of plants to make them grow strong and tall. Take your own plant home

Please note: parents and guardians must remain on site. Tea, coffee and other refreshments will be available for sale next door at St Kew Harvest farm shop.

Booking for the workshops is essential, please e-mail: info@camel-csa.org.uk. If you have any queries, please e-mail dbarry2904@gmail.com or phone Danny on 01208 895083

We need carrots! Unfortunately we haven’t got any carrots in this week’s veg boxes as we’ve used up all the indoor-grown crop.

The few we planted in the field have fallen victim to the recent foul, wet weather. There’s some more just showing through the compost in the polytunnel, but they won’t be ready for some weeks.

So we’d like to source carrots from other local growers. Do you know of anyone who’s growing carrots within a 20-mile radius of our site at St Kew Highway in north Cornwall? (We put local food first, so they don’t have to be organically-grown.)

If you know of anyone, please tell us. And if not, please help us by sharing this request – either on Facebook or Twitter.

Camel CSA is offering fun and learning opportunities for children during the summer holidays.

We’re running three different workshops in August for under-12s. Each workshop will run from 11am – 2pm (including break) on our vegetable-growing site at St Kew Highway.  The cost for each child is £4, which includes art materials, squash/water and fruit/snacks.

Check these workshops out: –

  • Wednesday 15 August – COOL AS A CUCUMBER
Tickle your taste buds! The children will be challenged to try a variety of vegetables while blindfolded. More hands-on fun activities will take them around the site as they explore the local environment and discover their senses.

 • Thursday 23 August – WHAT’S ROTTING?
 Compost, marvellous compost! Explore it very closely and learn why it is so important. Discover that it is full of life and meet our specialists – the earthworms. Find out how long it take for different things to decompose and what’s happening in this process. We will also look into the growth cycle of plants.

 • Friday 24 August – READY, STEADY, GROW
Children will touch, feel and smell plants in a range of hands-on fun activities around the site. They will learn how to take care of plants to make them grow strong and tall. At the end they will take their own planted seed home to look after and practise their newly-learned skills.

Please note: parents and guardians must remain on site. Tea, coffee and other refreshments will be available for sale next door at St Kew Harvest farm shop.

Each activity will be led by our workshop leader (and Camel CSA treasurer!) Danny Barry. She’ll be aided by Camel CSA volunteers, all CRB checked.

Booking for the workshops is essential, please e-mail: info@camel-csa.org.uk. If you have any queries, please e-mail dbarry2904@gmail.com or phone Danny on 01208 895083

We’re in the midst of our spring growing rush so we’ve got loads of things to do on Camel CSA’s community vegetable plot. Jobs this Sunday include: –

• Putting compost on onion beds
• Planting onion sets
• Digging out dock weeds (really important so don’t get bigger)
• Clearing the legume beds
• Sowing calabrese seeds
• Cutting the grass
And finally…
• Washing down the interior of the polytunnels

We also need to find time to tidy the sheds, carry out some simple repairs, and make an inventory of our tools and miscellaneous equipment.

Oh – and sort out the seed packets!

What a difference the new polytunnels are making! 

The contents of this week’s seasonal veg boxes came almost exclusively from Camel CSA’s own plot.

Expert grower Mark Norman supplied us with broad beans and green onions from his smallholding in Bodmin. Richard Hore provided Cornish new potatoes grown in his fields above the Camel estuary.

When it comes to making local food work, you can’t get much more local than that.

The volunteer growing team have a variety of  jobs to get through this Sunday morning. We need to: –

• Mark out and form the third lasagne bed in the new polytunnel and plant two rows of tomatoes
• Weed the second brassica bed
• Prepare the second sweetcorn bed and move the sweetcorn seedlings to the cold frame
• Dig the remaining holes in the squash beds and fill each one with two shovelfuls of compost (the rest of the pumpkins and squashes will get planted later in the week)
• Plant the dahlias beside the squashes
• Sow a tray of cabbage, half a tray each of calabrese and turnips (six turnip seeds per module)

The ground inside our new polytunnel is rock hard as a result of the prolonged dry spell in Cornwall. So it’s proved too difficult to dig deeply by hand to prepare for planting the tomatoes and peppers.

That’s why we’re experimenting with a no-dig method known in the United States as lasagne gardening.

This permaculture approach involves placing cardboard on the ground to suppress the weeds, watering it thoroughly and then covering it with newspaper and thick layers of compost or other organic material.

We’re planting the tomatoes and peppers directly into the compost and a hole is being pierced through the cardboard so the plants’ roots get access to the earth underneath.

All being well, there will be lovely friable soil once the cardboard has rotted down at the end of the season.

So watch this space!

• Special thanks to Joe and Laura Brown at St Mabyn PO & Stores for all their recycled cardboard

Our growing team are going to be busy this weekend on our community veg plot at St Kew Highway.

Expert growers Mark N and Bridget, along with Bob and five-year-old Max, planted out hundreds of pumpkins and squashes in hot Cornish sunshine on Friday.

The high temperatures in Cornwall mean we have to keep a close eye on the polytunnel and cold frames. We must keep watering the baby beetroot, carrots, leek seedlings, french beans, cucumbers and basil in the tunnel, along with the seedlings in the cold frames, and the brussel sprouts and kale outside.

Our Sunday volunteers also need to: –

• Plant out spring onions, purple sprouting broccoli (Rudolph) and dahlias
• Feed the calabrese and stonehead cabbage seedlings and move them into the cold frames
• Weed the broad beans, parsley and celeriac
• Compost the next root bed
• Cut the grass 

Phew!

Members of Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s volunteer
grow-our-own team are busy sowing, planting and watering as the season gets into full swing. 

Expert grower Mark Norman is now employed on our St Kew Highway site two days a week to ensure everything goes to plan.

We’ve composted allium beds and planted onion sets – row after row of them. Broad bean and brassica beds have also been prepared and spring cabbages planted out. Additional lettuce varieties have been sown in modules, as well as turnips.

The potting shed is about to be erected and the cover put on the seeding tunnel. The mixed salad leaves planted in the polytunnel will be ready to pick for the veg boxes in a couple of weeks.

Many thanks to expert grower Mark N and current team members Bob, Bridget, Charlotte, Danny, Jenny, Kitty, Mark M, Mary, Mike S, Penny, Rebecca H and Robert plus five-year-olds Keira and Max.

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