Bugs in the bushes

Part of the Countryside Skills course is to be able to identify the different plants and animals living in our local habitats. We found beetles, spiders, slugs, centipedes, millipedes, butterflies, caterpillars and more while bug hunting in the garden - all very exciting!

There are many beautiful wildflowers out at the moment.  We identified cowslips, red campion, white dead nettle, buttercups and cow parsley among others.

We pressed the flowers and then tested our memories (and got the ID guides out again) a few weeks later when they had dried out.

The results have been preserved by laminating and will feature in the students’ portfolios.

Chickens and beans!

This week we have been learning how to keep the Earth Trust chickens happy and healthy. We topped up their water and fed them – our hens are friendly and like to eat from our hands. They even like a cuddle now and then!

They lay us lots of tasty eggs which we collect and carry carefully to the kitchen for the Earth Trust staff to eat. Sometimes we get to make them into cakes too!

We've also had a check on the peas and beans we sowed back in February. The broad beans were ready for planting out in the vegetable patch. 

Each student dug a hole with a trowel, carefully removed the plant from the pot and placed it in its new home.

 

It is especially important to water our beans with the dry weather we’ve had recently. We will water them every week at the beginning of our session.

We are looking forward to eating our broad beans later in the year!

Elderflower cordial

The hedgerows and fields are full of white blossom, and our students have been busy cooking up a tasty treat – elderflower cordial to enjoy at their end of year parties!

We picked the elderflower heads from the garden and brewed them over the campfire with water, sugar, lemons and citric acid. It smelt amazing and we’re looking forward to trying it in a couple of weeks.

Cooper's Oxford Pork

At the Earth Trust, we run a programme called Farm Step which offers land and farm buildings to aspiring farmers who have previously been locked out of the industry by high land prices or lack of skills. We support green businesses who will work together for sustainable land management.

One of our Farm Step tenants is Mark Cooper. Mark keeps his Oxford Sandy and Black pigs in the woods around the North Farm part of the Earth Trust site, where they forage in the undergrowth and encourage rare woodland plants to thrive in the disturbed soil.

Every spring, the Countryside Skills students pay Mark a visit to learn more about the pigs and how Mark and his family look after them. Today, it was the turn of our students from Wallingford School.

You can buy Cooper’s Oxford Pork sausages online or from local farmers markets. We can highly recommend them!