On Wednesday 7th December 2011, Angela attended the Preparing to Prosper: Building Resilience to Change Workshop at the Exeter MET Office.

Speakers included:

Alex Webb from Climate South West,
Manda Brookman from CoaST (The Cornwall Sustainable Tourism Project)
Emma Whittle sea – Chair of the Climate South West Tourism Sector Group, University of Plymouth

From this day, Angela learnt how to adapt and prepare for climate change.

Well, hello everyone out there. With the unusually warm autumn, and coldest summer since 1993, we seem to be having an unusual year. The recent weather update is that the beginning of October is going to be the warmest since 1985, some parts of Britain will reach temperatures of 27 deg C.

This unusual weather, however, has not affected the apples, and our Annual Community Apple Pressing Weekend is going ahead on the weekend of 14th – 16th October 2011.

This years pressing will include:

Adults pressing apples on the large press for cider whilst…
the children press on the mini press for juice.
Traditional games such as the original 9-pins and Bat-the-Rat.
Sampling cider from last year’s pressing.
Possible mulled cider sampling courtesy of book report writing service and his burner.
Open fire for toasting marshmallows (weather permitting)
Bring an instrument and play opportunity
Pumpkin soup – bring and share (pumpkins permitting)

Middle Coombe Farm is well named. Coombe, meaning a hollow in a hillside, has seen some little fairy like structures appear. So, if you keep your eye keen as you’re walking that way, you may well see out of the corner of your eye a fairy folk go scurrying by.

Richard Yabsley, our woodcutter, and Sam Ellis, a chainsaw pirate, have been working hard in the woods; During the winter whilst thinning the trees, Richard would come also use his chainsaw to re-create the tree stumps into the various sized carvings that now appear in the clearings on the walk up to the ‘Oak Tree’.

There has been quite a lot happening this past month (February) here at Middle Coombe:

We have just commissioned a massive wood boiler/burner to replace 90% of the gas and oil use at Middle Coombe Farm, a massive dream come true for us, (see below for pictures of completion).

We have completed building one storage barn in the woodland and the second drying barn we hope to complete next month, in order to commence our sustainable logs business for supplying to our local community.

We have made a stone pathway with rails starting at the pond and bringing you up to the middle road track on the way to the oak tree, to make it safer for all to walk.

This month we are resurfacing the middle track which the 4-wheel drive uses to bring guests up to the oak tree, and we have also cleared out trees around the oak tree to make wooden benches for seating instead of using hay bales.

The barn itself has had lots of work done regarding wind drafting, having erected the biggest curtains ever over the doors, these can be tied back if it is not windy, and we have doubled up all the sheeps wool which we use to insulate between the thatch and where it meets the cob walls, together with replacing the small windows with draft proofing material.