Briar Farm
@briarfarm
Establishing an agroecological, mixed-use farm on a disused plant nursery in Cambridgeshire, UK
Badger had a good go at wasps nest hidden in one of our wood piles. Glad the badger got to it before we disturbed it with a hay fork!
Courgette flowers headed out for a local event, looking beautiful in the morning light.
This year we’ve grown, picked, dried and ground our own paprika. How cool is that?!
We have some gigantic tomatillo plants this year that are just beginning to fruit. We’re making up salsa verde packs ready for people to make their own. Tomatillo, chilli, onion, garlic, coriander, all from the farm.
Turtle doves! We’d started to lose hope in seeing any on site this year as it’s quite late in the season. However, this week we’ve seen them multiple times, even sighting a group of three today! Fantastic news. Shows we’re on the right track with our habitat creation efforts.
Harvest 2026! It’s only a small trial plot of wheat this year. Next season we hope to increase this to more of a field scale and hold community planting, scything, threshing, winnowing and bread baking sessions. Watch this space!
An evening meander harvesting berries for breakfast. Raspberry, redcurrant and loganberry
Just one peach on our tree this year because of a late frost. We’ve been keeping an eagle eye on it and today was the perfect day to pick. We ate it while still warm off the tree in a suitably reverent manner! Absolutely delicious.
We’ve got an excellent new sweet pepper variety this year. Zitava is proving super early and productive. We’ve been eating it fresh but our main intention is to dry it as a paprika variety. We’ll dry the pods on racks for a few days then finish off in the dehydrator.
Absolute scorcher today. Still a few more days to go. We’re managing to harvest and send out veg but the growing, harvest, storage and transport conditions are challenging to say the least. It’s hard to convey sometimes just how hard this is becoming. Worrying times.
We’ve grown ourselves a bit of a melon grove in the glasshouse. It’s a triffidy chaotic jungle. If we play our cards right we should get 100 melons out of this space. If you’re lucky I might not eat them all myself.
Proud moment. We’ve persevered with okra for four years now and are finally starting to get a decent crop. We have four plants all beginning to produce. @smallholderific.bsky.social 👀
Early morning harvest. It’s exciting to have the tomatoes back in the mix!
Really lovely work party today. Great to welcome some new people to the farm. We mulched beds in anticipation of more hot and dry weather, planted out comfrey and harvested shallots.
Another year at Groundswell. As ever, lots of informative talks and a great opportunity to catch up with old and new faces.
Seed saving now starting in earnest. These poppies popped up on one of our tracks so we’ve been saving seed for cooking and sowing again next year on some of our rough margins. Anyone have some good recipes where we can use volumes of this in the kitchen?
Two exciting new additions to the farm species list today, a lesser stag beetle and a marbled white butterfly. Our deadwood habitats and rough grassland seem to be working their magic!
Harvested the first of our onions. They’ll be left to cure for two weeks before putting into storage. It’s been a tricky year for them; we’ve had a lot of them begin to bolt due to the extreme temps and drought. We’ll chop these and freeze for home use as they won’t store well.
We were appreciative of the extra help today digging out bramble roots in the East section of our glasshouse. Hot and sweaty work. We didn’t quite get the area renovated this winter for this growing season but we should be set for next. It’ll increase our indoor growing area from 450m2 to 950m2.
Courgettes starting to produce decent volumes now. We have three different varieties this year. We often make this Greek Cypriot side dish Kolokouthkia me t’afka - courgette and eggs. Fry courgette in olive oil, season, then fold in eggs and cook until just set. Simple but delicious
Nice little harvest this morning for someone. First of the new potatoes and courgette are now in the mix.
Here’s some greens that have thrived in the heat where other species would have bolted. Callaloo and New Zealand spinach make up our summer greens, with ‘true’ spinach being grown in the cooler shoulder seasons. The tricky part is selling them; they’re relatively unknown here.
It’s a brutal scene out there. Plants wilting, panicking and bolting. Seedlings frying in the sun. Strawberries ripening and rotting in the blink of an eye. Despite all the mitigations we’re putting in place, everything is struggling. This is the new normal.
Great to chat all things ecology and small scale farming with the conservation community at the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge today.