Went to get my first veg share tonight at Cilcain.
Ended up with a brilliant selection of baby beets, baby turnips, broad beans, shallottes, new potatoes, and picked the most beautiful sugar snap peas – some of which I managed not to eat straight from the vine and bought home!

We got the urgent jobs done even though not a great turn out at Cilcain on Sunday.
The biggest news is that I cut all the halms (foliage) off the new potatoes ‘Pentland Javelin’ as they were starting to show signs of blight. This won’t affect the spuds but I was hoping to escape this in our first year.

On my last inspection of our hive at Cilcain the bees were busy dodging the rain and keeping dry in their hive. So I was pleasantly surprised today to see they had started storing honey – looks like our favourite weed Rosebay Willowherb is being foraged by our bees.

The Northop group have made some great headway in the last few weeks since FlintShare became a ‘friend’ of the organic holding connected to Glyndwr University at Northop.

Paul spotted this excellent video made by Transition Forest Row, which looks at the need to grow more food locally and some of the different ways that can happen in a community. These include, garden share, allotments, CSA farms, and more.

We were dodging the showers but managed to crop loads of salad, broad beans, sugar snap peas, a few onions that were about to bolt and some rainbow chard.

OK so it was quite modest but Katja and Paul took the very first share (pictured). The Elderflowers are to make champagne and cordial.
Later Sandi took a BIG bag of salad leaves, too. There’s lots still to pick …..

A very hot day planting out brassicas!
We planted out 2.5 beds of purple sprouting brococolli, kale and cabbages, 1 halloween pumpkin bed, courgettes and dwarf French beans. We could have planted more but we ran out of netting and we don’t want those pesky birds enjoying them first!

I have had a great day with a group of volunteers organised through Flintshire Local Voluntary Council.