Happy New Year to All!
Well, we opened again at the end of November and lovely to see people back enjoying the garden and catching up—all socially distanced of course. Government guidelines mean Muddy Fork is allowed meet up socially distanced with 15 people per session supported by our volunteers. We have hand sanitiser and face masks and gloves as required when necessary for all to use.
Alas toilet facilities at the Idle Valley nature reserve remain closed, which has curtailed the length of our sessions at Muddy Fork. We are now operating 3 mornings per week, Monday, and Friday 9:45am – 12:45pm and 11am-2pm on a Wednesday.
We are continuing to take new referrals including self-referral.
We have been very busy behind the scenes and upgraded our website; the navigation is much better, and you can see what we have in our pantry for sale and order online. Also check out our Facebook page and Instagram.
Since the last newsletter, our former chair of Trustees Chris Locke has stood down and we thank him for all his hard work. Rachel Orgill- Jones is now our new Chairperson, Mike Bennett remains our Trustee in charge of finances and we also welcomed Darren Read and Jenny Bailey to the board of Trustees.
In December, we attended an outdoor socially distanced Christmas market, organised by the Chequers Inn at Ranby. We sold hampers containing handmade chocolates, honey and preserves all made by the Muddy Fork team and we also sold lots of our herb bushes. Rachel, our chair of Trustees and Heather were vey busy that day making wreaths for Christmas, making some on the spot to order. These sold well alongside our willow Christmas stars. We also donated Christmas hampers to St. Saviours and to the hospice.
Over winter our worms were moved in to the polytunnels to keep snug, the bees are also hunkered down for the winter and have been treated to protect them from varroa mite. We face regular battles with the bunnies who seem to be excellent escapologists, either escaping out of our garden (good) or tunnelling in to help themselves to our produce(bad).
We had a socially distanced day of willow harvesting, which is now drying and hopefully we will have another day in February.
We have created a second tree nursery to uproot and move established oak trees into this after removing the prime root and letting superficial ones grow…..this stops the oaks getting so embedded that we cant dig them out for sale.
We have lovingly cared and nurtured our rare black poplar trees and now have sold 60 to the Trent Rivers Trust, and they are going to be planted along the river Trent, with another batch ordered for next year. The black poplar is rare and one of Britain’s native trees which is in decline, so we are delighted to help repopulate our landscape with them.
We still have lots more black poplars, oaks, and elms for sale- see our pantry for more details.
Now it is winter, before we start sowing next year’s crops, we have been undertaking maintenance. Our hub has been painted twice and now has guttering- we await the inside to be completed once funds allow. We acquired an extra shed to keep bee equipment in and that also has been painted as have 2 planters which we will add to our existing beds.