Despite the dry summer, autumn dampness seemed to arrive just in time for a spectacular display of seasonal colour.
The autumn fungi seemed to enjoy it too, with an abundance of edible and non-edible varieties popping up around The Secret Acre.
Continue reading
As I write this, the UK is being battered by the second named storm this winter. Already ground sodden all last spring has returned almost instantaneously. It never really went away.
The year has basically been too cold and too wet. In record breaking amounts thanks to climate change, and the moving, possibly collapsing Gulf Stream.
England has suffered its second worst harvest on record because of the weather. If you think the damage from growing number of storms and floods in bad, just wait until we hit global food shortages.
Continue reading
It has been the usual busy summer period here at The Secret Acre, since enjoying the first produce of spring, punctuated by the sadness of having to say goodbye to a beloved elderly member of the family.
Continue reading
January tends to get a bad rap as a month.
We blame Pilot for letting the rot set in when they sang in their 1975 No1 hit single “January, sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me”.
But as Josephine Nuese, author of The Country Garden pointed out, gardening really begins in January, with the dream. So come last year’s cold snap, or this year’s unseasonably mild weather, we kind of quite like January here at The Secret Acre.
Continue reading
It hasn’t just been biodynamic tear peas that we experimented with this year, our plans for a mushroom bed progressed too.
The idea germinated some years earlier when we visited GroCycle in Devon to see their project growing mushrooms on recycled coffee grounds, as a possible business idea for The Secret Acre. Continue reading
While the other side of the World burns, here in the UK we have had constant rain and flooding for well over three months now.
The fires are an immediate threat to life, while the crops lost to flooding speak of the future food shortages we can expect as the extreme weather events of climate change accelerate.
Away from human hubris, at least the mushrooms have been enjoying it, with boom in rare mushrooms are appearing across the country. Continue reading
The Secret Acre 