Honeydale Heritage Orchard

12/16/2015 02:11:00 pm 0 Comments



We’re creating what we believe will be a unique heritage orchard at Honeydale, complete with all the old Oxfordshire varieties of fruit trees as well as varieties and including some rare and unusual apple varieties.


The Honeydale Heritage Orchard was planted with the help of the Wychwood Project, the staff at Cotswold Seeds and friends of the farm. Varieties were planted a standard 30ft apart with an orchard within an orchard at its heart. This is an enclosed and protected space created with trees grafted onto smaller rootstocks, which we plan to use for education as an outdoor classroom.

We have always wanted to create an orchard and when we met with Andy Howard from the Heritage Fruit Tree Company near Banbury a couple of years ago our dream came into fruition - quite literally! Andy has spent the last two years hand-grafting dozens of regional species so that we had 250 trees to plant. These include 144 apples, 35 cherries, plus apricot, damson, gage, mulberry, nectarine, peach, pear, plum, quince and nectarine.

The varieties include the historic Old Fred, Red Army and Blenheim Orange found at Woodstock, Oxfordshire in about 1740, the original kernel planted by tailor George Kempster. We also have the Belle de Boskoop which originated in the Netherlands, as a chance seedling in 1856 and the more recent Deddington Pippin, propagated by Andy Howard in 2000 and featured on BBC 4’s recent ‘Apples’ programme.

‘This is a major initiative since many of the rare varieties are no longer grown commercially,’ says Andy Howard. ‘The Honeydale Heritage Orchard will help to ensure their survival.’

The orchard has been planned to provide edible fruit all year as well as attract wildlife, adding to the rich diversity we plan for the farm, with a range of agricultural and horticultural projects to provide a unique blend of products and interests.


We are missing just two varieties for our orchard - the Oxfordshire Greening and Corrie Washer - which Andy is tracking down for us and hopes to be able to plant next year.

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Lots of Linnets

11/11/2015 03:46:00 pm 0 Comments

Dr Richard Broughton from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, had a great visit to the farm this month when he came to update the bird survey. The size and diversity of our bird food plots is really paying off.



He recorded approx 300 Linnets, 100+ Yellowhammers, 35 Goldfinches, 60 Greenfinches, 140 Fieldfares (on the hedgerow berries), about 30 Song Thrushes, and SIX new bird species! These were Stonechat, Brambling, Grey Wagtail, Mistle Thrush, Golden Plover (a fly-over flock) and a young Cormorant checking out the ponds from the air. That takes the bird list to 67 species. Richard also added a new mammal - Grey Squirrel - although this was close to the owl box and might have moved in.

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Cotswold Rivers Trust Demo Day

11/02/2015 11:30:00 am , 0 Comments

Last year, with the help of the Cotswold Rivers Trust, we created a natural flood management feature at Honeydale Farm to hold up water flow at peak times and reduce the input into the River Evenlode, as well as creating a more diverse wetland habitat. Since the project at Honeydale provides a small scale, working example of how this type of flood management can be implemented on wider catchments in the UK, we were delighted to welcome representatives from various water and river authorities, councils, and bodies including the Environment Agency, as well local people and flood action groups, to discuss what we had done and it’s wider implications.





The day's events, which began at the Beaconsfield Hall in Shipton Under-Wychwood, were introduced by Trevor Cramphorn, Chairman of Cotswold Rivers Trust, before Ian Wilkinson and Sam Lane talked about the water management works that have been undertaken at Honeydale Farm. This was followed by presentations from waterways management specialist Vaughan Lewis, Dave Gasca, Hydrologist from the Evenlode Catchment Partnership and, Alistair Yeomans, Chartered Forester from the Sylva Foundation who spoke on the topic of Woodlands for Water. The day ended, after lunch and a Q&A session, with a site visit and tour of the works at Honeydale Farm.






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October Update

10/27/2015 01:46:00 pm , 0 Comments

Thames Organic Growers

We were delighted to welcome this group of vegetable growers who are interested in making soils more fertile and productive by using green manures. They came for a morning walk and talk, presented by Sam and Ian. We had a look at existing crops as well as what has been newly sown, and happily, the sun shone.


Sheep Grazing

Since the beginning of October, we’ve had sheep mob grazing on our spring-established herbal ley and spring-sown Sainfoin, at the rate of 100 sheep per acre, per week, back fencing each strip as we go. The idea is to graze down the fields so they’re not winter proud and leafy. The sheep certainly look like they are enjoying it and will be on the leys until early November. 



Sainfoin being grazed - note electric fence

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Combined Effort & A Quick Fix

9/22/2015 12:25:00 pm , 0 Comments

The combine harvester we bought earlier in the year had its first outing last week, when we brought in the spring barley.

The sun was shining, all was running sweetly and we filled our first tank with grain. But then we could unload no more, due to a problem with the unloading auger.





Anyone who’s tried to repair a combine will know how difficult it is just to get access to anything. We were soon covered in prickly ears of barley and baking in the hot sun, listening to the taunting hum of fully-functioning combines busy at work on the neighbouring farms.

After several hours we had to admit defeat and called in the local engineer from Cotswold Combines. He visited the following morning, diagnosed a broken bearing in the unloading auger, and had it up and running within a couple of hours. The only trouble was the rain, which forced us to postpone harvesting the rest of the barley.

A week later we were able to finish the job, with a good yield of 1.8 tons per acre with 15% moisture content. We’ve sold the barley to a local farmer for feed and we shall be baling the barley straw, probably for bedding and feeding to sheep.

Our main reason for growing spring barley though, it that it’s traditionally been grown at Honeydale and though we’ve diversified with various other crops and mixtures, we wanted to retain a small acreage of the original crop to benchmark ‘before and after’ soil conditions.

On the subject of quick fixes,we’ve been experimenting with a method of soil improvement in the form of over winter green manure which we believe has been used little in the UK in recent times. We sowed our Summer Quick Fix, comprising mustard and legumes, in one of the fields and it’s grown well, smothering weeds and creating double the density of a trial brassica mix of radish and mustard. We’ve now purchased a crimper/roller with blades and will use it to flatten and cut some of the green manures before drilling with rye and vetch to protect the soil over winter..

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Honeydale Video Blog Part 3 - Beekeping Part 3

9/16/2015 04:37:00 pm 0 Comments




The third instalment of our Honeydale Farm video blog shows our bees arriving at the farm! Paul talks us through the details of transferring the bees from where they were originally brought along to the farm, and making sure they go into the hives without any problems and settle in as they should.

Hope you enjoy!


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Water, Woods & Farming

9/08/2015 02:58:00 pm , 0 Comments

Last week Ian Wilkinson gave a talk on the flood alleviation project at Honeydale Farm at the ‘Water, Woods and Farming’ event which took place in Ditchley Park, near Charlbury, on the evening before the annual Forest Fair, organised by the Wychwood Project.

The event was attended by around 30 landowners, countryside stakeholders and representatives from organisations including the local water authority and Environment Agency.

 

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Bird & Mammal Survey Report

8/17/2015 02:26:00 pm 0 Comments

The results for the Honeydale farm bird and mammal survey are with us for this year and they make for very interesting reading.

Below is the report, along with the 2014 version of the same report for comparison, well worth a few minutes of your time.





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Pollinator Walk at Honeydale

8/11/2015 12:04:00 pm 0 Comments

Join us at Honeydale Farm this Saturday 15th August for a Pollinator Walk organised by The Wychwood Project.

We’ll be looking at the roles of pollinators, their habitats, why these have declined and how we can conserve them. Honeydale Farm's fields of flowers and grasses encourage bees and other pollinators so there will be a walk and talks, with a presentation by Ian Wilkinson of Honeydale Farm, a beekeeping demonstration by Paul Totterdell, and tour led by Ian and Sam Lane.

These will be followed by a lunchtime BBQ with local grass fed beef burgers from Ian and Cathy Boyd’s Whittington Lodge Farm near Andoversford. The event starts at 11am. Tickets are £10 per adult, £5 if you are a Wychwood Prpject member - book through:

http://www.wychwoodproject.org/cms/node/21

Under 14s are free and dogs welcome.

Honeydale Farm, Station Road, Shipton-under-Wychwood, OX7 6BJ



* The Wychwood Project uses the focus of the Royal hunting Forest of Wychwood in Oxfordshire to encourage local people to understand, conserve and restore its rich mosaic of landscapes and wildlife habitats.

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Natural Flood Management & Other News

7/27/2015 11:25:00 am , , 0 Comments

Natural Flood Management



Last winter we created a natural flood management feature to hold up water flow at peak times from the spring and reduce the input into the River Evenlode. The feature also created a more diverse wetland habitat at Honeydale and provides a small scale, working example of how this type of flood management can be implemented on wider catchments in the UK. The Cotswold Rivers Trust under the guidance of waterways management specialist Vaughan Lewis, returned to Honeydale a few weeks ago to carry out some improvements, having observed how it’s performed so far. They dug deeper into the bottom pond to increased it’s capacity and have introduced aquatic plants, including iris and sedge, to improve habitats. We look forward to seeing how the water course reacts this winter when the flow is higher.



Other News



We’ve bought a set of cultivation disks so that we can experiment with shallow soil cultivation techniques and weed control. The idea is to look at how traditional cultivation techniques can be utilised to remove weeds, with a lower reliance on chemical methods of weed control. So far we have noted that to get a reasonably weed free seedbed, the ground must be disced two to three times before sowing, set at a shallow depth to cut weed roots without moving excess soil and bringing up more weed seeds.

The ewes and lambs were sheared just before the weather warmed up and are grazing well on our permanent grassland.



We are planning to establish an orchard in November in the twelve acre grass field, with three hundred mixed fruit trees and an ‘orchard within an orchard’ of denser, shorter trees for children. The aim is that the orchard can be used for education at all ages, from schoolchildren to students studying orchard maintenance. 

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Honeydale Video Blog Part 2 - Beekeeping Part 2

7/24/2015 02:01:00 pm 0 Comments

In the second of our regular video blog updates from Honeydale Farm, Paul talks to us about the second stage of installing hives into your farm. Paul talks us through the process of building up the inside of the hive, describing in detail all the internal components and explaining their reasons for being there.

Look out for part 3, where the bees will actually be introduced.

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Honeydale Summer Update - Crops

7/24/2015 09:45:00 am 0 Comments

The Crops

We planted a variety of crops earlier this year and it’s been encouraging to see them all growing so well.



The twelve acres of Herbal Ley we planted in May germinated slowly because it’s been so dry, but with more rain, it’s now flourishing. We ploughed and power harrowed the ground, before rolling it to consolidate the seed bed. We then lightly comb-harrowed the seedbed just before sowing to eradicate a flush of weeds, chiefly field madder and sowthistle. The seed was then spun on with a spinner and rolled the same day with a flat, heavy roll. We used Cotswold Seeds’ Mix 20 which is a deep rooting diverse ley designed to provide nutritionally balanced grazing on the light thin soil that is typical in the Cotswolds. It is usually used for rotational grasslands, with the aim to improve low organic matter, thin soils, which would then be put back into arable crops. But we’re using it to improve soil health, since it includes deep rooting grasses, legumes and forage herbs, and also so that we can study this mixture in depth. The next stages will be to graze it lightly in autumn and utilise it properly next year with mob sheep grazing.


Cotswold Seeds has been interested in sainfoin for many years. It’s a traditional Cotswold crop but it’s popularity has fallen away because of establishment issues and an intensification in agriculture, with higher inputs. Since the Honeydale soil type should be ideal for sainfoin we were keen to get a crop in. It’s been planted with companion grasses, meadow fescue and Timothy, which will help to increase the yield and reduce competition from weeds. It was sown on 4th June, which was quite late, but despite this it has established well thanks to the warmer late spring soil temperatures and is now about 6cm high, with several leaves. It will be interesting to see if it has enough time to flower this year.

Barley has been grown for many years at Honeydale so we’ve sown control plots in each of our fields this year to monitor what happens when the land is left as it was, compared to fields sown for improvement with diverse mixtures of species. Despite having had no nitrogen fertilizer, the barley is coming into ear now. We’ll be combining it ourselves later this summer..


One of the remaining fields at Honeydale has been sown with a soil improving mixture called Summer Quick Fix (mustard and clover), A Short term crop, designed to provide green cover during summer and be incorporated during autumn, with another over-winter crop later sown to improve soil organic matter. The idea for this field is to continuously grow a variety of green crops, with the aim of stimulating the soil biota and increasing organic matter, over a number of years. We will monitor the organic matter levels as well as soil structure to see the time frame it takes to improve the health of the soil in a continuous green manure system.

In early June we sowed two mixtures of seed bearing species designed to provide overwinter food for birds. The One Year Winter Birdfood is an annual mixture, with triticale, linseed mustard, millet, fodder radish and quinoa. We’ve also planted a Two Year Wild Bird Seed mix designed to stay in the ground for longer. This contains triticale, kale, quinoa and fodder radish, which will provide food over winter. The recent rain has been very beneficial and both crops are doing well. 


The hay meadow has been cut after good growth and produced 83 round bales Before cutting, we allowed all the wildflowers and grasses to go to seed to keep seeds to perpetuate growth. We spotted yellow rattle, red clover, hedge bedstraw and birdsfoot trefoil. We saw one bee orchid last year but have now counted five. The meadow will be grazed for sheep later in the autumn to tidy it up.

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Honeydale Video Blog 1 - Beekeeping Part 1

7/07/2015 03:10:00 pm 0 Comments


In the first of our Honeydale Farm video blog updates, our resident beekeeper Paul Totterdell introduces us to the idea of beekeeping, and takes us through the first part of the process of building the external components of a hive from scratch, explaining the process and why he wants to be a beekeeper at the same time.

Look out for part 2 where the internal components of the hive will be described ahead of the bees being introduced in part 3.

*Oops! apologies to anybody in Mickleton, we've realised it's in Gloucestershire rather than Warwickshire as Paul said in the video*

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Barn Owl Update

7/01/2015 03:19:00 pm 0 Comments

Ian Anderson of The Barn Owl Project (part of the Wychwood Project) called at Honeydale Farm this week to check for any developments in our barn owl box. An adult owl, probably male, was briefly sighted flying from the tree branches above the box. There was significant evidence that the box had been used over the past weeks but no sign of breeding activity. While this is disappointing it’s not surprising. It has been a very late year for barn owls. Pairs have been late to start egg-laying and some have not even got that far as yet. Egg clutches and young brood have been smaller than usual.


The reason for this is almost certainly a shortage of prey; this has been a ‘population crash year’ for short tailed field voles, the main prey for barn owls. This crash happens every 4th or 5th year and affects barn owl breeding every time. There is evidence that prey populations are now beginning to build up again so it is likely that we will see more late broods than normal. Fingers crossed we may still have barn owl chicks at Honeydale Farm this year.

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Well Bee-Hived

6/16/2015 01:43:00 pm 0 Comments

Our resident ‘Bee-Man’ Paul Totterdell spent a couple of days in his back garden this week building beehives from a flat-packed kit comprising many pieces of wood and many many nails. The outer shells and inner boxes of the hives are now complete but they still need bases and the internal frames (the racks that the bees build their honeycomb on). They’ll be transferred to Honeydale Farm later this week ready for painting before the bees arrive, which we are expecting to be during the first week of July.



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Bees for Honeydale

6/04/2015 02:41:00 pm 0 Comments

I’ve always been keen to keep bees so when Cotswold Seeds acquired Honeydale Farm in 2013 I was a big step closer to realising a lifelong ambition, so I’ve been looking forward to this opportunity for a long time.



I was asked to bring two items to a one-day beekeeping training course organised by Chris Wells of Cotswold Bees - a pair of Marigold gloves and a pair of Wellington boots!


The course took place at the Three Ways Hotel in Mickleton, Warwickshire and there were around ten of us enrolled. Interestingly, there was a high proportion of enthusiasts from London because beekeeping courses there are fully booked. Beekeeping is big in the city apparently, where pollen and nectar sources are greater than here in the countryside because there are so many city-dwellers looking to experience a slice of country living in their small but well stocked urban gardens. This says much about the need to increase pollen and nectar sources on agricultural land. Chris Wells of ‘Cotswold Bees’ is passionate about ensuring proper training though, saying “the world does not need more keepers of bees, it needs more beekeepers”. Responsible beekeeping is not as simple as it may seem and according to Chris’ experience, training makes a huge difference.

To that end, we spent the morning, after coffee and cake, learning all the beekeeping basics, do’s and don’ts, everything from necessary equipment to bee behaviour, to life-cycle and identification.


After more coffee and cake, we then donned our beekeepers outfits (the first time I’d worn one) and headed to one of Chris’ apiaries nearby. The suits were the modern variety with concertina veils and were surprisingly comfortable, albeit quite hot! The baggier they are the better, so we were told, as this keeps the bees further from your skin if they do decide to sting, but believe it or not the protective equipment does not stop bee stings getting through. The suits are designed to stop the insects crawling through gaps in normal clothing and also make it easier to remove stings. For the rest of the day Chris showed us how to handle the bees and equipment, including proper use of a smoker, and how to identify different parts to the colony and hives.

So now I’m all set. I’ll be building two hives next week and they’ll then need a couple of weeks to weather before painting and will hopefully be ready to receive bees at the end of the month. Watch this space!





Paul Totterdell





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Spring at Honeydale

5/26/2015 11:25:00 am , 0 Comments

Spring at Honeydale





We’ve been planting grass and wildflower margins at the edges of the fields to create pathways to walk around and we’ve also sown our Dry Land Herbal Ley in one of the arable fields. The seeds were broadcast with a spinner before rolling in. For many years the 11 acre field was used for growing barley so the soil has been rather neglected and the aim is that the herbal ley, which will be down for 4 years, will help to remedy this. We will be watching the growth of the different species contained in the ley with much interest. It rained all day after we planted it so we’re expecting to see the first shoots in a week or so. Since there’s a water source nearby, the plan is to manage the field with livestock, mob grazing with sheep. 

We’re hoping to harvest seeds from the sainfoin crop in the polytunnel, so we’ve introduced bumble bees to pollinate the plants.



The wildflower field is blooming with cowslips, red clover, tufted vetch, lady’s smock, buttercups, yellow rattle, birdsfoot trefoil, sorrel, hedge bedstraw and bee orchids, growing among the sweet vernal grass, meadow foxtail, and other meadow grasses.

The sheep are grazing well on the lush spring growth, with the lambs growing particularly strongly, along with the ewes which we will be shearing soon.





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Barley

5/07/2015 10:36:00 am 0 Comments

Now the soil has warmed up we’ve planted a strip of barley in each the arable fields, a total area of about 4ha, retaining what was grown on the farm before, and it’s already started chitting. Get the combine greased up - it looks as if we have got a crop!

Sam has topped the new wildflower area on what was previously arable land, which often has a problem with grass weeds, especially blackgrass. The blackgrass is an annual so cutting it should control it and stop it shedding seed. The wild flowers in the same area are a mix of perennials and annuals so it will be interesting to see whether the cornfield annuals come back this year. At Cotswold Seeds we are regularly asked for advice about how to manage wild flower meadows and weeds so it will be interesting to see what happens on our own farm.





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April

4/22/2015 11:28:00 am , 0 Comments

We have now power harrowed and rolled the fields that are to be sown this spring. But...its gone dry so we now hope for rain and have decided not to sow anything till rain is on the horizon.



The ewes and lambs continue to increase in number as spring finally arrives.

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Ploughing

4/16/2015 02:05:00 pm , 0 Comments

The fields where spring barley was formerly grown on Honeydale were ploughed a couple of weeks ago by Nigel Adams. We will be sowing sainfoin, herbal leys, green manures and experimental seed plots over the next few weeks, once we have obtained suitable seed beds and the weather consistently warms up.

 

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