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Surrey Docks Farm - January 2021

Behind the Gates

It's been a quiet month here on the Farm, as we went back into lockdown and all our participants had to stay at home. The remaining tiny team have worked hard caring for the animals and adapting to remote delivery once more.

We had a light covering of snow towards the end of the month. The animals are given extra thick straw beds and coped fine. Our sheep weren't bothered at all and carried on eating and wandering about the yard; they have lovely thick warm fleeces and seem oblivious to the weather. The goats however were sensibly hiding away and staying warm under cover all day!

Thanks to funding from Veolia Environmental Trust we were able to get started with building works to improve our hand washing facilities and toilets. This was a priority even before the pandemic and will now help us with our aims to reopen to visitors safely later this year.
The funding enables us to install new hand washing troughs by the goat yard entrance, to improve the existing outdoor sinks and to upgrade the toilets near the shop. The upgrades have carefully considered accessibility and the environment; so that we now have two accessible toilets on site and two of our toilet blocks are flushed using rainwater.
This work wouldn’t have been possible without Veolia’s funding, thank you!

Support the Farm

Huge thanks to everyone who supported us throughout 2020. We saw record breaking donations and thanks to this we have been able to continue caring for the animals, growing food and engaging our community.

We're busy planning for the new financial year that starts in April and are working on ways to adapt and survive through another uncertain year. We usually rely on over 60% of funds coming from income generating activities which we're not able to run during the pandemic. So we're still heavily reliant on the support of grants and donations to ensure core costs such as the rent and animal feed bills are paid!

As well as covering core costs, we're eager to keep developing and meeting local need. Our Youth Committee have been supported to consult with peers and formulate new ideas and plans for our youth programme. Together they have designed a new youth club called 'Greenagers' that would engage 14-18 year olds and fill an existing gap in our provision. We're delighted to announce that our application to the Jack Petchey Foundation was successful and along with match funding from British Land we'll be launching this new 'Greenagers' youth club in the Spring!

Livestock

The Oxford Down ram and the Anglo Nubian billy goat we had on loan returned home after spending a couple of months with our flock and herd. We had the breeding ewes and nanny's scanned and are delighted to announce they're all pregnant and many are expecting twins. All the goats and sheep are due to drop in April so we'll have a busy weeks then!

This month the vet visited to give the donkeys, pony and pigs their regular vaccines. A month after this Rupert the boar will go in the pen with Marmalade our sow and hopefully we’ll have piglets in the summer.

Winnie's piglets are now 5 months old and separated into male and female pens up on the yard. They are very playful and love nibbling on volunteers' wellies, as well as enjoying a good back scratch!

The maintenance of our muck heaps is an ongoing task! Daily cleaning of the animal pens creates a lot of waste which is heaped up and 'watered' with dirty water pumped down from the duck pond, via our biodigester. This reduces water waste and helps the straw down rot much faster.
Once the muck has rotted it makes a fantastic natural fertiliser. This month we've been using our loader machine to fill up ton bags for community gardens, top up raised beds on site and spread on the cow field to level the paddock. Huge thanks to Chris French, the Redhill NFU branch and the Worshipful Company of Farmers who generously donated to enable us to purchase this machine, it's been an incredible help, particularly during the pandemic when we can't have big teams of volunteers on site.

We do still have to do some muck heap work by hand though! Smaller rotted manure bags for local gardeners have been filled by the team and are back on sale via our online Gardening Shop.

Training Projects

With the return of lockdown we sadly had to cancel onsite delivery of our training projects for adult students with learning disabilities. We're missing everyone here and the Farm feels very quiet! Luckily there are lots of signs of Spring to cheer us up, including Snowdrop flowers opening by the New Leaf growing space.

We've been posting weekly newsletters with lots of photos and calling our students to keep in touch. Meanwhile we've ordered lots of seeds to prepare for the mammoth seed-sowing season and kept the growing beds tended ready for the students return.

Our Training Coordinators have also been carrying out maintenance work. Rachel's built a new growing bed, which she filled with our well-rotted manure and then will top with soil. This will increase the Plot to Shop growing space so we'll have even more delicious produce for you via the farm shop this year!

Heritage

The first photo shows some of the hundreds of plain white china fragments that have been collected from the foreshore over the last few years - in case they're part of our Metropolitan Asylums Board and London County Council receiving station crockery. There's never been time to sort these properly, until now, in this further lockdown.
After sorting the fragments into types, the next job is to try matching them against the existing pieces in our collection - such as these M.A.B. bases. There's already some progress; in the third photograph you can see some of the plate bases starting to come together.

Youth Programmes

It's been wonderful to see so many Young Farmers on our online sessions in January. A huge congratulations to all these young people for joining online and achieving a new AQA award each week!

To kick the year off, the Young Farmers learned all about the benefits of wildlife gardening, which plants attract bees or butterflies in a domestic garden and how they can create suitable habitats for wildlife.

Next up the Young Farmers completed their Animal Welfare AQA award where they learned the five animal freedoms and completed animal care checklists together for rabbits, sheep and chickens. At the end of their session the children also learned about the RSPCA Assured foods and higher welfare farming systems.

At the end of January to coincide with the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch our Young Farmers completed their AQA unit award in Bird Identification. The young people learned what birds need to live, reproduce and thrive, some techniques for visually identifying birds, the key issues affecting birds in the UK, ways of attracting and helping birds, how to observe birds without negatively impacting them and the equipment used to identify birds. By the end of the session the children demonstrated the ability to name five different bird habitats and to identify 10 species of common garden birds.

During the pandemic our Youth Workers are delivering a programme of 1:1 sessions at the Farm for young people needing additional support and guidance during this difficult time. Feedback from young people and their families suggest that these are very valuable for children experiencing hardship as they are afforded the chance to reconnect with their Youth Worker, the animals and plants that mean so much to them.

Alongside the weekend delivery, our fantastic team of staff and volunteers have made weekly quizzes, set up local scavenger hunts and created forest school craft activities (including instructional videos) for the children to take part in. We have also prepared growing spaces and sowed vegetable seeds for the year ahead so we can continue to offer the families we work with free food.

Behind the scenes the team are compiling evidence for London Youth's Silver Quality Mark. This is an accredited quality standard for youth work, with the silver level focusing on the opportunities we provide young people, ensuring we are engaging young people in meaningful decision-making and supporting them to reach their potential. The silver quality mark also assesses the training and support we provide to staff and volunteers.

Thanks to support from Hubbub we have been distributing mobile phones to our participants so they can stay in touch with the Farm, school, friends and family. Our Youth Manager attended training in working with young people on issues of race and racism and online approaches to environmental education,
as well as preparing for the recruitment of a new Youth Worker for our exciting new 'Greenagers' project for 14-18 year olds launching in Spring!

Well done to the youth team for all their efforts and hard work keeping local young people supported, connected and engaged through lockdown. It's a very difficult time for so many and we send everyone our thoughts.

Wildlife

This month we took part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, with one of the team recording all the birds they spotted within one hour. A few of our regular birds - such as the little wren often seen around our compost heaps - didn't make an appearance but we still recorded a good selection including: grey wagtail, starlings, robin, goldfinch, blue tit, great tit, magpie, wood pigeon, feral pigeons and house sparrows.

We're very proud to have a resident flock of house sparrows chattering and fluttering about in the Farm hedges. It's much easier to spot the little brown birds now the hedges have lost their leaves.

It’s a great time to spot catkins, a reassuring sign that Spring is on its way! The picture below shows Hazel catkins in one of the Farm‘s hedges. Hazel is monoecious, which means that both male and female flowers are found on the same tree, though hazel flowers must be pollinated by pollen from other hazel trees. The long yellow dangly flower (or catkin) is the male part. The female part is further up the branch, at the top of this photo, it looks like a small yellow bud with a red style emerging.

Cormorants aren’t often seen stopping at the Farm; there’s no high perches for them overlooking the river. But this month we spotted one resting on the stumps of the pilings from the River Ambulance Service jetty on the Farm’s foreshore.

We've continued to feed our wild birds and ensured they have a daily supply of seeds and nuts in the feeders in our wildlife garden. If you would like to help us to do so, you can buy bird see via our Amazon wishlist which will be sent straight to the Farm, find out more here.