At the last Community Farmer Day of 2014 there were 30 of us on the field.
The week had been a rainy one. So the giant blackboards that welcome everyone bore the words in large chalk letters 'Mud on field'.
Was that right we thought? Surely it should say 'Mud is field'.
So we made up this limerick…
There was once a carrot named Stew,
Who lived in the valley at Chew.
He was dug from his home,
Deep in the loam,
That’s why he comes muddy to you.
Mud, dirt, earth, soil… where would we be without it? But nice clean vegetables have become so normal it comes as a surprise to find our carrots, spuds, celeriac and parsnips all covered in dirt.
Some love it - some hate it. My mother was always dead against mud, but secretly I like getting muddy, maybe it’s one small way of being rebellious. There’s something elemental about abandoning our usual fastidiousness and getting smothered in the stuff, on a rugby pitch, a Tough Mudder run, a mountain bike ride, or just in the garden.
Hundreds of millions of years of geological and biological processes have produced this amazing thing we call soil. It is multilayered, has hundreds of components many of them living, is a mini ecosystem in its own right and contains everything plants need to thrive. A soil scientist is called a Pedologist.
So as it washes down your plughole give a thought to its role in nurturing our food.
Angela Raffle
Volunteer, box customer and Board member of The Community Farm
