It is great to see that Ben and Charlotte of Fordhall Farm have reached their target of £800,000 early and managed to save the Farm. They are still accepting donations that they will be putting towards developing the site further.
We will be watching Fordhall Farm closely in the near future and hope the project will be a huge success.
Whilst stumbling around the Internet this evening I came across a very interesting site. Ecotopia.co.uk is a great site selling all kinds of environmentally and socially responsible products.
One that really caught my eye was the Elephant Dung notepad, that at just £3.50 seems like a real bargain to me! The product was conceived in an attempt to help the cause of Asian elephants in Sri Lanka, so its a winner on all sides.
Might be worth considering them for the next birthday for the person that just has everything.
The date is drawing ever nearer and the axe ever closer for Fordhall Farm.
The farm has until 1st July to come up with £800,000 to prevent its sale by the land owners. The farm and shop would close and the 70+ year legacy started by the current tenants family.
For a mere £50 you can make a difference and keep this farm running with Charlotte and Ben Hollins!
What are you waiting for? Check out Fordhall Farm and see for yourself.
And good luck to Charlotte and Ben from all at Organiclinker.com!!
A new dimension has entered into my “organics” lifestyle - air miles. Although I do grow quite a few vegetables and some fruit, I still have to supplement my efforts with bought produce, especially in the early spring.
I recently found my hand hovering over the early season organic runner beans in the supermarket, and saw that their country of origin was Egypt. Similarly the organic apples were from New Zealand, the tomatoes from Israel. So, in the light of inescapable findings on pollution from airplane emissions, a new dilemma faced me, pollute my body or support pollution of the planet?
The planet obviously won, so I hot footed it to a Farmer’s Market which had newly established itself nearby, that very day. OK a lot of the produce wasn’t organic (or exotic!) some claimed to be but …? I had my doubts. However it was all fresh and appetising and hadn’t travelled more than twenty miles, but to my purist soul it was still less than ideal.
If we look at opinion polls, many say that “growing their own” isn’t feasible because of constraints of time/ space/ soil etc. But let’s face it, if we’re sincerely concerned about our health and that of the planet, then it’s time we realised we can all do something, or do more. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - grow baby tomatoes and basil in your hanging baskets instead of the ubiquitous trailing lobelias and fuschias. Runner beans will happily clamber up your pergola and a courgette plant will be just as rewarding in a pot on the patio, provided it’s in a rich compost. Once you’ve picked 4″ courgettes from your garden and stir fried them with mushrooms, lemon juice and black pepper, you’ll never look at those limp, jet-lagged, supermarket offerings again. Neither will you lay any more decking or paving, which afflicts suburbia like a rash and prevents rainwater from soaking into the soil, adding to the drought problem.
Even the poorest soil can enhance your table with produce. My own garden is basically sand, on which even torrential rain disappears without trace. However, the culinary herbs love it and together with the more ornamental herbs like lavender, I have sage, rosemary, marjoram, hyssop and savory growing at a phenomenal rate in the sunniest spots, much to the joy of foraging bees. Well, if the buzzing is anything to go by they’re joyful! The happy bees pollinate my courgettes, beans, tomatoes, apples and pears and their uncontaminated residue goes back into the compost heap.
I like to think that in growing organically, and buying responsibly, I’m not so much gardening as co-operating with nature, and doing my part to ensure that my great-grandchildren will not be permanently attached to a respirator because of the damage my generation did to the environment. By consciously working with, rather than battling against nature, I have seen in the fifteen years of having this particular garden, an increase in both the visiting and indigenous species of wildlife and insects.
This has given me immense pleasure and fulfillment and I have been encouraged along the way by the work of the Henry Doubleday Research Association, whose public interface is www.gardenorganic.org.uk, and by the writings of the late Lawrence D. Hills, a founder member of the same organisation. I cut my horticultural teeth thirty years ago on his book Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables and have yet to find anything to surpass it for knowledge and sheer common sense.
There’s a huge marketing push regarding Recycling and reduction of food packaging at the moment, and all the directives are coming from consumers, not industry. Consumers have cottoned on to the fact that price rises cannot be the result of fuel prices alone. Packaging and supplementary marketing materials all add to the cost of the product.
We are filling an extra 1-2 recycling bags a week now compared to this time last year, and we’re not buying a noticeable amount more than usual. The only factor we can attribute this to is the increased bulk caused through packaging.
Yogurts and dairy products are now being shrouded in cardboard and individual serves of food contained within an outer are all adding to the waste products making their way to landfills across the UK.
What can you do to help reduce waste?
Buying larger serves of products then dividing them yourself is one option. For example, why buy 4 individual serves of yoghurt when you could buy a large pot, and the same goes with soft drinks too. 500ml bottles are 88p each whereas a 2 litre bottle is often £1.20 or less.
Switching to products that have responsible packaging practices will help alleviate the problem, and force rival companies to follow suit.
An initiative we will be trialling is shopping bi-weekly, purchasing larger servings and dividing them, reducing the CO2 emissions caused by transport and buying our groceries from market stalls every other week. Our delivered groceries are packed in more bags than is really necessary, and we already hand unwanted bags back to the driver and recycle these at the supermarket where possible.
Our council (Wandsworth) takes an active role in recycling, delivering plentiful supplies of recycling bags every 6 weeks, yet some councils in the greater London area have no recycling facilities at all (the residents struggle to get these services provided).
It’s never too late to start recycling, but don’t wait longer than you have to. By changing your buying habits or actively recycling packaging you are doing your bit to reduce waste and harm to the environment.