by Josiah Meldrum December 05, 2020
When we moved into our new Bean Store on the Sotterley Estate we asked our landlord Tom whether we could plant a hedge and a few fruit trees. ‘I think we can do better than that...’ said Tom.
And so this week, appropriately enough National Tree Week, a wood was planted at the back of the Bean Store. It went into a cover crop established by @robravenfarming. Over the last few months this has been home to and has fed (will continue to feed) a mixed flock of birds - as well as a kestrel (at times it’s been tense out there).
Over the next few years we’ll watch Andrew the forester’s plan develop as oak, birch, wild service, walnut, Scots pine, wild pear and more grow and fill the space. This spring we’ll plant a few trees of our own in gaps left for us, and in the area where we eat in the summer.
We believe there should be more space for trees on farms - in the form of woods and also more formal agroforestry systems (such as at @wakelyns). But also (especially) scrubby ‘untidy’ areas. Even small areas provide an incredibly important habitat for invertebrates, small birds and mammals and their predators.
There are also a host of potential ecosystem services - from carbon sequestration and flood risk mitigation to insect pest control, pollination services and nutrient cycling - but you know what, let’s also just celebrate the beauty; things don’t have to have a function defined by us to have a place.
(Reposted from our National Tree Week post on Instragram)
June 27, 2025
June 25, 2025
Have you driven or cycled past our front door and wondered what goes on behind it? On Saturday 21st June we opened our big Bean Store doors for a chance to shop with us in person and have a look behind the scenes. We'll be doing it again.
June 11, 2025
We mill British-grown wholemeal red millet flour through our stone mill in Suffolk. The crop was grown by Andrew Lingham at Court Farm in Kent and is a species called Panicum miliaceum, a proso millet probably domesticated in what is now northern China 10,000 years ago. But what is millet - or rather, what are millets?
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