Rambling #173

September is a month when many people order their first veg box with us. The summer holidays are over, routines are returning, and the late-summer produce makes our boxes particularly colourful and varied. Over the years, it has also become an opportunity to advocate for organic food and farming, thanks to the Soil Association’s annual campaign, Organic September. This makes it a great time to share what we do with your friends, family, and community – more on that at the bottom of this e-mail.

Needless to say, this summer has raised some difficult questions about how we source water and irrigate our crops here at North Aston Organics. I work on the assumption that our field crops need irrigating roughly once every two weeks, while crops in the tunnels need watering once a week. We mainly use drip lines, or trickle irrigation, which delivers water directly to the base of the plants, and so this summer has been a relentless exercise in moving pipes around to make sure everything is covered.

The impacts of the drought have been particularly acute on our newest growing site, Allotment Field, where we’re still building up the organic matter and soil structure that help with water retention. But even in Mill Field, which we’ve been farming for many years and where the richer clay soil should give us better water retention, many crops have not enjoyed these dry conditions.

One particular challenge for organic farming is our use of cover crops and green manures to build soil health. These crops need to be established across whole areas of soil, so they require an irrigation method that covers the entire surface rather than delivering water only along crop rows. With so little rain, we’ve been forced to try mains water and sprinklers, although with mixed results.

But we can no longer rely on mains water alone. It is becoming increasingly costly, and the water pressure here at North Aston is too low for it to be a reliable solution at the scale we need. And so we must adapt. Each of our growing sites will require a slightly different approach, from boreholes and reservoirs to investigating the possibility of river-water abstraction at very small scales. Over the years, we’ve been admittedly slow to develop resilient systems, but necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.