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Farm Newsletter - December 2019

Welcome to your monthly round up of news from the Farm!

We want to say a huge thank you to BCLP Law who have helped as corporate volunteers in the summer and have donated an incredible £1000 to our fundraising campaign to bring a new electric supply to the Farm and in turn enable us to engage new cafe tenants. Along with 158 people’s generous donations, this takes us up to a total of £5,195.02 on 27th January. Thanks to each and everyone of you!
We have a big target to hit, so if you'd like to find out more and donate, please do visit our website.

We welcomed guests from Time & Talents and South London Cares for a festive farm gathering! We had lunch in our new warm and accessible river room; followed by animal handling led by our youth volunteers and Cow Pat students. The group were also invited to take part in a bulb planting workshop with our Green Mentor, taking home pots of Narcissus bulbs that will flower in the Spring.
Thanks to Age UK Lewisham & Southwark for supporting this event and to all who came and made the afternoon so special.

Did you know our beautiful new river room is available for hire every weekend? With views across the River Thames and our goat yard, plenty of warm light space and the whole Farm to explore, its perfect for a children’s birthday party! For full details, availability and booking please visit our website.

Christmas Fair

Thank you to everyone who helped to prepare and deliver our wonderful Christmas Fair - including all our dedicated volunteers and the generous local businesses who donated raffle prizes.

We loved welcoming so many visitors to get in the festive spirit with fair games, wreath-making, mulled wine, donkey rides, craft stalls, tree sales, carols from a local church choir and much more!

Our fairs are key fundraising events with all proceeds going back towards running costs, which helps to keep the Farm open and free to visit every day. The Christmas Fair brought in an incredible £5,000 profit. Huge thanks to all who came and contributed to this event's success!

Volunteers

Volunteering is a fantastic way to meet new people, gain skills, help your local community, become more active and have fun. Here what our existing volunteers have to say: “I wholeheartedly recommend volunteering. I look forward to catching up with everyone & the chance to be outdoors away from the busy city is really refreshing. The community spirit is so strong, knowing you’re contributing to something special is awesome.”

Volunteering also makes a great New Year's Resolution that's easy to achieve as we're currently recruiting for volunteers!

We're particularly in need of those who can commit to a regular weekly shift to care for our animals and/or help serve customers in our farm shop.

If you're interested in volunteering please see our website for more information and to complete an enquiry form to register your interest.

Heritage

This piece of patterned glass is one of many such broken fragments that have recently been found embedded in the mud under the farm's river-wall:

We've discovered that this design was first registered in 1892, meaning that this glass may actually have come from the smallpox receiving station here. We know that they added a lot of new accommodation, bathing, medical and disinfection facilities to the site between 1895 and 1902, and would undoubtedly have needed lots of 'obscure' glass panes such as this, to let in light but preserve privacy. The pieces of glass are emerging from the same area where other relics from the receiving station have been found; it's quite likely to have ended up there as a result of the Blitz.

Training Projects

We deliver training projects for adult students with learning disabilities. Students develop skills in a range of areas including horticulture, retail, cooking, crafts, animal care and basic maintenance.

Cow Pat
We welcomed a new student to the group this month, Jack loves animals, especially the donkeys and the ferrets and has settled in really quickly. Unfortunately we have had to say goodbye to Julie who has been with us a year and did so much fantastic work with our pony, Kiera, including teaching her to jump! The student Christmas party on the 19th December was a fantastic opportunity to say goodbye and get some great Cow Pat group photos. It was a wonderful event where we gave out AQA certificates to all the Cow Pat students, ate loads of food, played party games and showed off our fantastic dance moves. What a fantastic end to a fantastic year!

Moo Crew
Throughout December, we at Moo Crew have been living up to our name by cleaning out the cow barn every week. We also spent some quality time scratching the foreheads of Bourbon and Jaffa, our two Aberdeen Angus cross cattle.
The run up to Christmas was very festive, with Christmas jumpers, tinsel, fairy lights and a Christmas tree making an appearance. The term culminated in our annual Christmas party - complete with festive food, games and dancing - where students were awarded certificates to demonstrate what they have learned over the term.

Plot to Shop
The students were busy getting in the mood for Christmas; making wreaths, Christmas decorations and planting inside bulb pots for early spring. The highlight of the month was the student Christmas party where the students received AQA certificates from Santa and Rudolph. Well done everyone and thanks for all your hard work and achievement this year!

New Leaf
Our horticulture students have had a very festive month! They made Christmas wreaths from scratch and decorated them with holly and eucalyptus from the Farm. Wednesday group enjoyed a trip to the Bede's Christmas Fair and the final winter planting was carried out - with Harry sowing spinach and garlic bulbs in his raised beds behind the Segal building.

Farm Produce
The Farm Produce stall was very popular at the Christmas Fair, with honey and many preserves selling out within the first hour! The cake stall sold a delicious selection of homemade cakes. Thank you to everyone who baked for us.
We celebrated a year of hard work at the Student Christmas party and AQA Certificates were awarded for Basic skills in jam making, Making apple crumble, Making bread and Health & hygiene in the food technology room. Well done everybody!
We said goodbye to Helena who is moving to the countryside and hope she'll be very happy there.

We currently have spaces in our training projects for new students, find out more about our offer via our website.

Livestock

We have a handsome young billy goat and ram visiting to father the next goat kids and lambs! We're a bit later with breeding so will expect the new arrivals in April-May time. We're putting requests out to large farms already, so we're hoping to take on triplet or orphaned lambs again from March time for bottle-feeding. We'll announce on our website and social media channels if/when the lambs arrive so keep a watch out for this Spring highlight!

Our donkeys have been very much in demand for school and church nativities! We can take a selection of our animals out to schools and community events to enable hands on learning. Full details available here.

Putting Down Roots in Rotherhithe

This month started off with fifteen tons of our well rotted manure going out to three locations in the borough, Millenium Green Park in Waterloo which is looked after by Bankside Open Spaces Trust, Caspian Street Allotments and Tabard Community Allotments. Our manure is a really great mulch to use this time of year to add moisture and fertility to your soil.

We had a festive baking session with our Sunday volunteers, using whole spices. They baked decadent cinnamon and cardamon buns to share with other volunteers, staff and take home. They finished the session feeling much more confident in their baking skills and smelling rather festive.

The Farm hosted an Elder’s festive event in our brand new River Room and sun filled Orangery where we planted up terracotta pots of classic Tete-A-tete daffodils which will flower indoors in early Spring.

Our 2020 programme of green workshops is now live on our website. These include urban food growing, seasonal eating, natural dyeing, plant journeys and beekeeping. Find out more here.

We had a busy and engaging Sunday session looking at how to prune apple trees with volunteers. We looked at a range of apple trees on our site and tried out our new skills on four very different trees. All eleven volunteers who attended this session will receive an AQA unit award as a record of their achievement. Good Gym joined us in the afternoon to weed the community plots and mulch the paths with woodchip, great work guys!

Youth Programme

We deliver a programme of exciting outdoor activities for children and young people aged 0-13 years. Thanks to British Land and National Lottery 'Reaching Communities' for their financial support.

The Young Farmers worked exceptionally hard to run the pop up cafe at the Farm for the Christmas Fair. They baked produce to sell and made teas, coffees and hot chocolates for all of our wonderful visitors. The children broke the record for sales on the day which will help support the running of the Farm. Congratulations to all!

The Young Farmers enjoyed a party at the end of term with lots of games, food, fun and festive music. In the past year the 43 Young Farmers have enjoyed 500 hours of free activities, workshops and events at the Farm. Huge thanks to the youth team (including volunteers) that make this all possible. We look forward to another fantastic year of youth work ahead!

Please consider helping support our youth projects by gifting from our Amazon wishlist.

Support Us

If you enjoy and value the Farm and can help with a donation of any amount, we would be extremely grateful of your support. Please see our website for various ways you can help us.

Or if you're a local business and would like to sponsor a project at the Farm, please contact: manager@surreydocksfarm.org.uk for further information.

The Forge
Kevin Boys our resident blacksmith holds classes every Sunday from 10am -12pm
Tel: 07984416269