Hello folks. Isn’t it lovely when winter finally fades, and the leaves come out and wave? The birds are singing, sun is shining, and it’s time for our green fingers to un-glove, and get to work. It’s just magical, planting a seed and watching it grow. We are incredibly lucky to be able to do this for our local community, and grateful for all your support.

If you’re wanting to become a member, you’ll be as pleased as us to see our seedlings coming along nicely, being nurtured for the last few months in the greenhouse, before they end up at their final destination, delivered to your door each week (if you’re in Redruth and sign up of course) – and I can’t wait to see the pics of your culinary creations. We will have a member’s Facebook group to share this stuff.

So what have we been up to? All sorts. There was a lot of tree planting in Jan-Feb, one of us had covid in the last month, and then we were busy on an environmental campaign for a couple of weeks, so it has been hectic. It feels great to be back in Cornwall!

This week we delivered lots of veg from the beds planted last year, to a local CIC (Community Interest Company) called Food Troops – which helps struggling families with food in Redruth. This felt great, and the right thing to do, and we will continue to support local struggling people on behalf of our members. If you’re struggling to put food on the table, please send us an email and we will help if we can.

What’s left to do? So much! The polytunnel trench needs some more work, and we are hoping to put a skin on in the next few weeks, and then fill it with tomatoes, aubergene, peppers, and all sorts of heat-loving plants.

So far, if you’re curious, we have planted (from the top of my head) aubergene, many different speciality carrots, 2 varieties of cucumbers, lots of chicory, green and brown (used for dhal) peas, several different beans, a few types of beetroot, turnips, spinach, chard, 4 types of kale, kohl rabi (if you haven’t tried this, you’re in for a treat), endive, so many colours and flavours of lettuce, 3 types of tomato, edible flowers for the salad mix, 3 types of garlic, 3 types of broccoli, leeks, spring onions, radish, asparagus, and probably many more that I’ve missed. We still have so many favourites to plant in the next few weeks, like sweetcorn, courgettes, and a dizzying array of salad leaves and flowers! I’ll add pics of the seed packets we have left after our recent flurry of planting – quite a selection! I felt the need to stock up after the seed shortages in the last couple of years, just in case. We are using heritage varieties, and will save an increasing amount of our own seed as time goes on.

So here are some pics to show you some of all this. Thanks for reading folks! Please get in touch if you’d like to join us, whether as a member, or as a work-share volunteer, or just to say hi.

I wanted to blog here and personally thank some friends, the welly wangers (it’s meant to be endearing), for kickstarting me with getting the polytunnel up. It’s far from finished, but we at least removed some saplings that needed to be rehomed, installed lots of ground tubes, and got 1 hoop up!

I’ll actually have to take it down again to add the right fittings, but I wanted it up to celebrate the milestone. The tunnel has been in bits since I bought it 2nd hand last summer, and it’s been one of those vital jobs that just gets put on the back burner – do you have those? Well finally, we’ve made a start, and although I’ll need to get the digger back to change the trench location and lots of other things (I was rushed last time), we should be up and running with a working tunnel before the growing season starts. Fingers crossed.

Oh, and I laid hundreds of metres of landscape fabric, ready to plant some wind shelter trees and habitat! Happy days. Now for the long slog of planting hundreds of cuttings and bare-rooted trees before spring comes.

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You heard it here first! We have finally become a Community Interest Company, officially.

What this means is, we’re a company that doesn’t allow directors or employees to take dividends and siphon profits away for personal gain. Any and all profits are put back into the business, specifically to support the aims of the business – to feed local families, support people experiencing food poverty, and help to create a more resilient and sovereign local food system that can weather future storms.

I would like to mention here, that along with myself, we have 2 amazing directors that will help the business to grow in the right direction. Thanks Tamsyn and Rob! Exciting times ahead.

Personally, I’m pretty chuffed about this milestone. About 6-7 years ago, I became a fellow of the Cornwall School for Social Entrepreneurs, which trains people up in creating social enterprises, and I have been working towards this ever since. I’d like to thank Cornwall SSE for their support and help, which is first rate and really a beautiful thing to be a part of.

To get growing at a scale that can support 1 or 2 full time jobs, there are still tools to buy, tracks to lay, irrigation to finish, polytunnels and all manner of expensive things that need a little more investment, so now that we can apply for some of the various grant funding awards that are available to social enterprises, CICs and charities, I’m hoping to make the Grassroots Garden a self-funding and sustainable business within the first couple of years.

In other news, we have been enjoying 3 colours of carrot, Kohl Rabi, beets and turnip, roasted to perfection.

Also, a bait-hive was found on the floor, upside-down after the storms! I didn’t actually realise there were any bees inside until I moved away part of the disintegrated stand, and saw it pretty full and buzzing! I swiftly suited-up, fixed what damage I could, added another layer (called a super), and put it on a more stable base that should withstand the rest of the winter. Fingers crossed – I hope they last through the winter. I love those furry friends.

I know it’s probably not that impressive for seasoned growers, but after we had a cold and rocky start to the season, it has been lovely to watch some of our veg grow. Check em out!

Bert has been boring us again! Well, boring the ground with his fancy drilling rig. It’s the 3rd hole he has drilled, so all our fingers are crossed that this time, he hits a decent pocket of ground water.

The 2nd hole, it was assumed, had a decent amount of water. It was one of the deepest I’ve heard of, at 82m! Most of the time, Bert hits water by 40m, so for such a deep hole to run dry after a few minutes, it’s not a good situation. Lots of time, money and energy has been spent on lowering, raising, re lowering pumps, cables and pipes, and without a reliable source of water, our project can’t really grow all that well.

It’ll take a while to get the pump up from the last well, and installed down into this one, I’ll keep posting updates so that I can remember this part of the journey in a few years time.

This drought has been really frustrating. Especially so when we discovered the borehole was dry! Finally, we’ve had some rain that is now stored in the tanks, which can only mean one thing: waterslide! Oops, not that: planting out!

Thank goodness for that rain! It has enabled us to plant out loads of kale, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, Kohl rabi, and there will be more going in soon.

Thanks go out to Jez, for doing some dowsing for us. Bert the borehole guy could do with a little assistance, as the last 2 holes he drilled have been very deep, and very dry, so we’re working on drilling another asap so we can really get this show on the road.

Will the borehole find enough water to keep the crops alive? Or will we have a super soggy spring that nourishes the seedlings?

I’ll keep you in the loop! And I’ll be posting pics of the veggies as they grow or get eaten. Fingers crossed!

Finally, we had a massive delivery of compost last week while we had a digger and a dumper for the hardstanding. It was by far the largest delivery we’ve ever taken. It was more than a series of trucks full of the black stuff – this is the whole basis of the market garden, and it’s a massive milestone.

I got rid of the rotorvator a couple of years ago after experimenting with “no-dig” growing, and although the up front cost is rather substantial, the pay-off is worth it. Most of all, this method is better for the soil, as it is left intact and doesn’t expose the soil life to harmful UV rays, or let it wash away in rain. It should help with retaining water, and we should have less weeding to do, so we’ll see how this goes.

Another milestone that keeps creeping in and out of focus, is the water situation! I blogged about the borehole pump, getting it stuck and then freed again. Well, after successfully lowering the pump for what I’d hoped was the last time, it appears that the well is dry! After a few minutes at least. This is not sustainable so we are having some more dowsing done to see if it is worth having another go, or if we spend on connecting to mains instead. What a palaver!

So for now, things are a little up in the air.

There is no doubt that we will be growing veg, but our greenhouse full of seedlings can’t be planted out yet, because we haven’t got enough water to nurture them properly. This is rather frustrating, but we’re relieved that it happened now, after a drought, so that we know how limited the borehole supply is and can make changes before we had huge crop failures.

We’re praying for rain. We have thousands of litres of rainwater storage, but this recent gorgeous weather has a price.

Jez will be dowsing tomorrow, so fingers crossed he finds something and we can get this market garden growing!

This blog post is about our bore hole. Our 82 metre deep borehole, that until this weekend, had a pump stuck at the bottom!

Why was it stuck? I’ll explain that later. How did we get it unstuck? With lots of research, patience, and help from our friends. What a relief!

When we first dropped the pump down into the well, everything seemed to go so smoothly. It went down nicely, and worked once it was connected to a friend’s generator. The problem was, the thin rope that had supported the pump, was sooooo damn tight, that we knew something was wrong. It was almost tight enough to snap, and was impossible to raise the pump, even an inch. This was not a good start, and so I couldn’t leave it like this.

Once the pump was switched on, the force of the pressure was pulling it down, and the pipe was wanting to sink deeper, and I knew we had to raise it again, so I eventually landed on building a tripod and using an engine hoist to do the heavy lifting. I’ll mention here that me trying to lift the stuck pump actually put my back out and I was out of action for a little while! So the hoist was going to be necessary.

After learning and implementing lots of new techniques, like using climbing knots to pull on the ropes, and custom made clamps to grab onto the pipe, we started pulling, and the hoist was doing an amazing job. After some moments of incredible force being applied upwards, it seemed to get easier, so we ditched the millimetre-by-millimetre hoist and pulled by hand.

It was a dream! Whatever had been keeping it stuck had come unstuck, so all my worries of having to ditch the well and get a new one drilled were on hold. A few times it got stuck again, so we used the hoist, and eventually we got the pump to the surface and celebrated with tea and hugs.

The pump had a small metal clip on one side, clamping down the cable. This clip had somehow been slightly bent, which meant that it could do down, but got caught on the inside of the plastic liner when it was coming up, and our brute-force technique had bent the metal further, forcing it beyond what was possible by hand, and luckily it bent itself into a shape just small enough to make it up and through the tight space.

Now we’re not yet sorted for water, because we have to drop the pump, cables and pipe again once we’re sure it won’t get stuck, this time on a thick rope that won’t stretch, but we’re at least further than we were last week.

Thanks for all your help – you know who you are.