Thank you so much to everybody who ordered from us last week, we were blown away by the level of support, it made a massive difference. When you buy with us, we notice, supermarkets don’t, but we do. So, thank you so much from everybody here.
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We had three little remarkable surprises this week (not counting all your amazing orders), we received Irish organic cherries (Can you believe that!) from Darragh Donnelly in Dublin. Emmanuel our farm manager found a small robin’s nest in our farm shed and finally after 18 years of picking stones we found a solution to our stone problem! The cherries are amazing, and I guarantee that you will not find their like in any supermarket shelf, so thank you Darragh.
As to the robin, he or she, I certainly can’t tell, (can you tell?) chose a very inconvenient location to build (I will go with a she) her nest: right in the middle of where we are coming and going all the time. But we are going to be careful and the three little eggs that are in the nest will not be disturbed.
The stones have been, and I have to go a little further here than calling them an inconvenience, they have been a devastation for so, so long. But completely by chance this week I got the number of a contractor that has a stone crushing machine for farms, yes there is such a thing, and it is quite remarkable. So, in the space of 12 hours, this very nice fella and his tractor crushed all our stones, releasing vital nutrients back into the soil.
Afterwards we tried making some vegetable beds, this usually can be quite a fraught process, shaking the machine, destroying tines, and frequently lifting the whole machine out of the ground when you hit a big stone leaving the bed in less than an ideal shape. But the bed forming in our “new, stoneless” farm was quiet and smooth, and just nothing short of amazing.
Watch a little video from our fields here.
So, stones and robins making nests in odd places, two inconveniences, can we live with them? The robin yes, but the stones, they just had to go! This is the issue with our approach to agriculture these days, we aim to eliminate anything that is inconvenient, and there is a long list of these inconveniences. Weeds, eliminate them with a quick spray of roundup, aphids reach for the next can of spray and so on and so forth, it doesn’t stop; hedgerows, take them out if they are taking up valuable space, trees cut them down make way for production. What is this madness? The shortsightedness, the relentless focus on extracting the last cent from the land to the detriment of all the other aspects of our living world that we need. WE NEED BIODIVERSITY it is not and optional extra!
Maybe there is no other way, while the cost of produce continues to be so devalued, maybe that is the true price that must be paid. The price you or I pay at the till for the plastic clad supermarket produce absolutely does not reflect these sacrifices the natural world makes for our convenience.
So, the question is: can we afford these inconvenient truths? Is it worth it to get the very cheapest price possible? Well, I will leave you to decide, and judging by your support for us last week and hopefully in the week and weeks ahead again you have already made your decision.
As always thank you for your support
Kenneth