July at The Rhynd

emily4052
Nov 4
3 min read

PLANET POLYTUNNEL

If we were to sell our farm produce in the café a few years ago, we would have been a fantastic stop for alcoholic cattle. Our wheat is sold en masse for animal feed, biofuels and the distilling industry, while our barley is also sold for animal feed and malting whether that is for beer, whisky or malt vinegar. Our oats might have been slightly more helpful as they’re at least sold to Quaker. Meanwhile, our oilseed rape goes off to make biodegradable plastics. Our farm-to-fork experience wouldn’t have been great.

We have tried to change that, though, as not only are alcoholic cattle terrible at paying bills, we have always wanted to serve our own produce at our supper clubs and forest feasts. We started with three Tamworth pigs called Hamela Anderson, Denise van Snouten and Claudia Oinkleham, and such was the success of those, we have got more this year. In case you were wondering, they’re called Ernest Hammingway, Pablo Pigasso, Francis Bacon, Amy Swinehouse and Lindsay Loham. Pablo and Francis (both girls because we ran out of bad puns) are Mangalitsas, which are apparently the ‘Kobi beef of pigs’. All they want to do at the moment is eat whatever footwear I have on when I feed them.

We also built our own polytunnel this year and, totally thanks to gardener Ronnie, this is throwing out salad and vegetables faster than we can handle. We’ve donated some to a local nursery and our poor head chef Jack is coming up with evermore brilliant ways of using it. The latest vegetable to be ready is the humble potato. Whilst we only have six rows of them (mostly Maris Piper), you get about 25 tonnes an acre on average. We’re about to start making our own chips.

All of this made us wonder whether we could do a series of supper clubs this winter where the food mileage is measured in metres rather than miles. The plan is to pick up all the ingredients on a bicycle in a morning. We’ll have more news on these soon. Expect some amazing dishes, and for me to swear never to ride a bicycle again for the fourth time in my life.

Our latest wine safari and forest feast was an amazing moment as it was the first time almost everything in a dish came from the polytunnel on one of these events. It included ricotta-stuffed courgette flowers, yellow courgette and basil purée, pickled beetroot, shaved fennel and garden salad. We’d managed two or even three ingredients before, but this was a far cry from sending oilseed rape off to make plastics.

ELSEWHERE THIS MONTH

We had a fantastic Bacon and Brakes at the start of the month with passenger rides in the Rage 140T. Proceeds went to the Army Benevolent Fund, and a big thanks must go to Bill Creavey for organising the autotest and Tom Johnstone for coming to drive it. Despite the rain, plenty of people made it, and we were very fortunate to have MG here displaying its new Cyberster and S5.

The harvest has started, and we’re into the oats, having cut the winter barley and oil seed rape. The combine really is an extraordinarily expensive bit of kit when it spends almost 10 months of the year static. We contract farm elsewhere, so it has been busy, much like the farming team. It’s now flat out until the winter crops are sown later this year.

Ed Foster