Fairy lights, swarm box, beer on swings – Loxley valley Community Farm

Lots of little jobs to tidy the farm up and make it the best it’s been all year for Open Farm Sunday – hoping for good weather and lots of people to join us for the day and hopefully maybe a some will want to join the farm.

Why not grow on top of the compost heap? These courgette and squash plants seem to really like it.

The main veg area is being weeded and tidied.

Planting sweetcorn in the middle of the no dig polytunnel which ironically required a fair bit of digging.

Put a new frame with netting up for peas to grow up.

Harry gave the roundhouse roof a quick hair cut.

The seedums appear to be doing very well on the roundhouse green roof.

We’ve been rather unlucky with our bees last year and this year, we’re down to one colony which seems to have lost it’s queen and is therefore dying out. When a new queen is born she leaves the established hive and takes a significant quantity of workers with them this is called swarming. By placing the swarm boxes in our back gardens we’re hoping to create nice welcoming places for those young queens to settle. If we’re lucky enough to attract new swarms we can eventually move them back to the farm and into proper full size hives.

After the hard days work we had a BBQ here’s Warren enjoying a beer on the treehouse swing.

We even have solar powered fairy lights in our roundhouse.

Thank you Sheffield Town Trust

We’re very fortunate to have won a grant from The Sheffield Town Trust to allow us to buy a very nice proper composting toilet block. So that should be installed on site in the near future.