After a spell of hot, dry weather (when the pond demonstrated to us that we will need to make one part of it deeper to give the creatures somewhere to go if we get a longer spell of hot, dry weather) followed by a week of rain, we now have a lot of exuberant growth everywhere.

For today’s working party, that translates into editing, really. Just taking out some of the Rosebay Willowherb so the mini nature reserve isn’t overwhelmed; chopping and dropping some of the comfrey, to let the apple trees and strawberry plants in the food forest breathe, letting the nutrients from the dropped comfrey leaves work their way back into the soil (but leaving plenty standing and flowering for the bees) – and so on.

It’s always lovely to spot and identify new species visiting/making a home – it feels like a validation of the work we’re doing. Here are a few of today’s spots:

The paths in the food forest needed a bit of weeding, and we spread a new layer of woodchip on top.

As a reminder, the mini food-forest is based on permanent planting and perennial plants – this takes less effort than sowing annual crops every year, but also doesn’t require digging – so the soil structure is not disturbed and, after plants are established, they don’t generally need much (if any) watering. This means that food forests are a good climate-adaptive way to grow food because they are more resilient to unpredictable weather.

With this food forest, we bought some fruit trees and bushes to start the plot off, but everything else is being planted up as and when we receive plants/cuttings/seedlings donated by plot holders – it’s a work in progress!

Here are some of the developing crops:

Huge thanks to Karen, Rita, Eloise, Guillermo, Jo, Derek and Janet for their hard work today.