Author Archives: Richard Pitt

Urban Permaculture Design Taster

UPDATE MONDAY 10TH APRIL: THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED. If you would like to be added to the waiting list in case of cancellations, or be contacted with details of similar future events, please complete the Register Interest Form and we will email you before Saturday 15th April to let you know if you have a space. If you don’t hear from us beforehand, please assume you don’t have a place this time

We are working with Wildhive Collective to host a design workshop on Saturday 15 April 2023.

Come and brush up your permaculture design skills/ideas as we discuss how to transform a small area of concrete into a garden.

This is an ideal opportunity for anyone interested in re-imagining and discovering how to design more sustainable, biodiverse and wildly abundant home and neighbourhood growing spaces, based on permaculture design principles.

If you aren’t already familiar with permaculture, then this practical design afternoon offers an ideal taster of how to grow with nature and for nature (including ourselves). As a follow on you may want to get involved in the design implementation sometime this spring!

Booking: https://forms.gle/b7PacCZK3g58h15u5
Event Timing: 1:00pm-5:00pm (flexible end times), Saturday 15th April, 2023
Event Address: Aldermoor Community Farm, Aldermoor Road, Southampton SO16 5NN
Suitable for: Adults (suggested minimum age for any participating, and accompanied, children aged 11+)
Cost: suggested minimum donation of £10 per participant is welcome
(Maximum of 20 participants)

Contact us: info@aldermoorfarm.org.uk or 023 8218 2716

Donations will go to supporting Aldermoor Community Farm’s (The Alder Trust’s) charitable aims and Wild Hive Ecological Education Collective’s outreach initiatives, including their ‘Growing to School’ pilot project and term-time Local Grow Packs & Kits, which Aldermoor are helping to trial this year).

Wild Hive Collective CIC is a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee (registered number 14508634). As a not-for-profit organisation, all of our profits are reinvested into our organisational mission.

We are funded by money we raise in the shop and from people supporting us. If you can make a donation that would be much appreciated. Especially during the winter and spring, when our produce sales are much lower than in the summer.

Donations can be made as follows:

Christmas Trees 2023

This year we are again stocking top quality Nordmann Firs grown by Woodman Trees, just north of Winchester.

We have kept the prices the same as last year.

You can get a quality tree from us at a reasonable price (held from last year):
[SOLD OUT] ~~4ft – £25~~
5ft – £35
6ft – £45
7ft – £55
8ft – £65

We are open from 2pm to 6pm Tuesday, 10am to 6pm Wednesday and Thursday, 2pm to 6pm Friday and 9am to 5pm on Saturdays.

Choose your tree and then we will wrap it for you in our special machine:

And how about this – when you’ve finished with your tree you can bring it back to us and we will shred it and use it as mulch for our paths!!

These are Nordmann Firs – they draw in water and retain their needles for a longer period compared to the traditional Norway Spruce and other types of Fir.

We had a very interesting time learning about how they are grown when we went to meet the team at Woodmancott. It is a stunning location on the downs north of Winchester.

There are half a million trees there.

The trees are planted out when they are 3 years old and grow on for another 6 years before being harvested.

There is so much care each year to ensure they form a traditional shape.

Care of your Tree

Cut trees are no different to cut flowers and they will dry out if they cannot draw up moisture. For best results, cut half an inch off the stem and use a water-filled tree stand.

Tomatoes 2022

Our tomato plants are now on sale!

We’ve grown them from seed in our polytunnel, using heat from compost to keep them at the perfect temperature.

These are not just any tomatoes. They are all very tasty and cover a range of sizes, shapes, colours and tastes. You can read the details on this page.

We are selling them at £5 each or 3 for £12.

Bush/Determinate

These kinds of tomatoes produce fruit at the tips.
Let form into a bush shape. Don’t pinch them out.
They tend to fruit all at once.
They tend to fruit sooner than vine tomatoes.

Dwarf Cherry – we are not sure the variety, but this feisty plant will do well in a container and give decent sized cherry tomatoes. We started them off in our compost-heated hot box in February and they are already flowering and producing fruit.

Vine/Cordon/indeterminate

fruit produced on trusses alternating with side branches
will keep growing up for as long as the weather is good
a succession of fruit as each truss ripens

Galina – Super-Early, but fruits over a long season. Bright-yellow cherry with sweet flavour and a thinner skin. Very productive. Comes from Siberia. Don’t be put off by the leaves – they look more like potatoes than tomatoes. Fruits grow to about 2.5cm in diameter and resist cracking. Grow as a vine, but let a couple of shoots develop if you want even more tomatoes!

Ruby – Early and productive; nice rounded red tomatoes. Can grow as bush or a short vine (1.2m)

Purple Ukraine – An early, reliable and productive Ukrainian heirloom variety producing purplish black plum shaped fruits 7-10cm long (to those in the know, the size and shape of a goose egg). Great in salads or cooked. Leaves are dark green and feathery – an attractive addition to your greenhouse.

Ailsa Craig – a fine old variety bred in Scotland in 1908. Tough, reliable and early to fruit. Bright red, medium-sized fruits and excellent flavour. Good disease resistance – will cope quite well outside if you don’t have a greenhouse Grows to 1.5m

Gardeners Delight – a small, super-sweet variety of the classic red tomato. Easy to grow. If we get a cool spell in early summer it will slow down, but will start growing again when the temperatures rise again.

Yellow delight – yellow cherry. Similar to gardeners delight but yellow.

Chocolate Cherry – deep red/black cherry tomatoes with rich sweet taste. Can leave 2 side shoots to grow on as this plant produces comparatively little fruit.

Skykomish – beautiful orange tomato, bred for resistance to blight. Quite large. Good taste.

Jen’s Tangerine – brilliant orange, great balance of sweet and acid. Large for a cherry tomato. Vines grow to a decent height and produce lots of fruit over a really long season. Seed has come from high in the mountains, so it is used to cold nights and short seasons.

Beef Steak – an unknown variety grown from seed saved by some friends.

Outdoor Kitchen – January 2022

This is a project update for our Outdoor Kitchen, January 2022.

We are so pleased to let you know that the construction phase is finished!

We had no idea it would take so long and we feel the pressure of our unfulfilled pledges, but we have news on all that here.

First a message from Farm Manager, Richard Pitt

During the 2021 growing season Louiza (our Edible Schoolyard Project Lead) was engaged to run Edible Schoolyard sessions at the New Forest Small School and has developed resources and ideas for the sessions that will be run at Aldermoor Community Farm. However, as mentioned in the above video, there won’t be any Edible Schoolyard sessions in 2022 as Louiza is going to be on maternity leave. We remain committed to the project, but it will have to wait until Louiza has capacity.

In the meantime have an exciting 2022 ahead of us. We will be using the space for workshops, social activities and hopefully a Saturday morning pop-up coffee shop.

Now here is a look around the finished Outdoor Kitchen structure:

Elsewhere on our website you can see more detail of the construction phases. We have photos and details of making the concrete base, putting up the timber frame, and covering the roof.

We remain indebted to our supporters – this is something we all have a part in.

We will continue to send out updates as we prototype the worktops and units we will be making to kit out the space.

Outdoor Kitchen – A great space

Here are a few pictures of our Outdoor Kitchen the first few times we used it.

You can follow the story of its construction on other pages.

Even before it was finished the volunteers liked to eat lunch here.

Our wreath-making workshop in December was a very happy time

Everyone seemed to really enjoy being in the space.

This panorama shot makes it look a bit round!

Outdoor Kitchen – Roof

We had originally planned to create the roof from some steel sheeting we salvaged from a falling down pig sty that was on site when we first arrived 7 years ago.

However when it came to it, we realised it was not such a good idea. It was not very true (a bit wonky). It had fixing holes from previous uses that we would have to fill. It would need a lot of cutting to shape – noisy and potentially sharp edges. And it was heavy to lift up in place.

So we bit the bullet and bought new sheets made of onduline. This is a bitumen based product, much lighter and easier to work with. This cost us extra, but we knew we just had to do the roof properly – being rainproof was the whole point.

This was also now a specialist job – it was stretching our skillset and we were also getting very busy expanding our shop ready for Christmas. Knowing this, one of the farm community came forward with a new donation that completely covered the labour costs for our carpenter Sam to come and finish the roof. What a relief. And what a result.

We don’t seem to have any other pictures of the roof in progress, but here are two from Sam’s instagram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sam Pitt (@bro.carpentry)

And this is the (nearly) finished article.

Outdoor Kitchen – Timber frame

This is page 2 of our Outdoor Kitchen story.

We had finished the concrete base in April, but our volunteer carpenter who was designing the timber farm had to take some time off as his wife gave birth to their third child in mid April.

We had to wait for his expert help, and we were also very busy with our summer programme of vegetables. We continued to landscape around the outdoor kitchen as we waited.

We were able to carry on in August. This page tells the story of how we got the timber frame up.

We had a lot of long pieces of timber to walk over to the site.

It was quite technical, making the beams and fixing them to the posts.

Celebrating the first big milestone in the timber frame.

It was good to have a large team to get the heavy posts and wall plates up.

Here is a time-lapse run through of putting up the posts. Watch for the chickens to the right of the picture too.

We missed a few picture opportunities when we put the roof up, but here is an early shot of the joists.

We had to work at the top of the ladder for some of it!

Big thanks to Sam Pitt (Brothers Carpentry and Joinery) who volunteered several Saturdays to lead on the timber frame construction. We couldn’t have done it without him. (And thanks to his family who gave him up for the day those times)

Finally, by mid-October the timber frame was finished.

Outdoor Kitchen – Foundations

This is the beginning of the story of the construction of our Outdoor Kitchen.

On this page is how we made the concrete base. Other pages tell the story of the timber frame, the roof, and the first few events in it.

First we had to dig out the 7m x 4m footings for the foundations…

…the team from the Rotoract Club of Winchester did most of the digging!

Next we made the timber formwork and laid a sub-base from hardcore and scalpings.

We had a lot of ballast and scalpings delivered.

We got good at mixing – we did just over 90 loads in the end!

The pad was so big we split it into 3 sections, taking a day to do each one.

It built our confidence (and our muscles) to learn new skills.

Lots of different volunteers enjoyed the learning process.

Finally, by mid-April the base was finished.

Follow the story with a look at how we built the timber frame and the roof.

Lead Grower – 2022 Season

We have an exciting opportunity for someone to join us for the 2022 growing season as our Lead Grower.

This is a 9 month contract to cover maternity leave.

The successful applicant will be working 2 days / week, responsible for growing our wide range of fresh produce using organic methods and the principles of permaculture.

Please see the job description for full details.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

If you want to apply, please fill out this application form and return it to us by email.