That prickly but endearing mammal, the hedgehog, is in serious decline. UK numbers fell from a population of around 30 million in the 1950s to only 1½ million in 1995, a decrease of 95%. Hedgehog numbers have continued to plummet, falling by over a third between 2003 and 2012. There may now be fewer than a million left.

There are a number of factors that might explain this dramatic decline. Habitat loss and habitat fragmentation are of particular concern. The larger fields, fewer hedgerows and loss of permanent grassland that accompany intensive agriculture reduce the suitable habitat. Pesticides reduce the numbers of prey available to hedgehogs, and weather also affects the availability of prey, especially unusually wet or dry summers. This is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, which is expected to increase the occurrence of extreme weather.

New buildings and new roads eliminate suitable habitats, while increasing traffic increases the number of road casualties – tens of thousands of hedgehogs are killed on our roads each year.

The decline has been greater in rural areas than in urban ones because gardens have, in the past, provided valuable habitats for hedgehogs. However, even in gardens, suitable habitats are declining where gardens are smaller and tidier, or where lawns and flower beds are converted to patios, decking or hard standing for cars. In addition, fences and walls prevent hedgehogs moving from one garden to the next. Hedgehogs and other wildlife rely on connections between suitable habitats – referred to as wildlife corridors – to move around their territory and find food and shelter.

Gardens can also contain hedgehog hazards such as steep-sided ponds, strimmers, slug pellets, netting that can entangle the animals, or bonfires that they may crawl into for shelter.

In hedgehog-friendly gardens, lawns, flower beds and compost heaps all provide nutritious prey such as earthworms, beetles, snails, slugs and caterpillars. Gardens can also provide water and shelter and, if sufficiently undisturbed and secluded, can provide suitable areas for breeding and hibernation. In return, the gardener benefits from the large number of slugs and other garden pests that the hedgehog devours.

You can help your neighbourhood hedgehogs by making sure your garden provides a rich habitat that is free of hedgehog hazards. Also ensure that the animals can gain access by replacing fences and walls with hedges, or making small holes at the base so that hedgehogs can move freely from one garden to the next. A gap of only 15 cm is sufficient.

Labour is one of the most important resources for the farm since we rely heavily on volunteers to cultivate and harvest the crops. So anything that reduces labour is of great interest to us. One approach we are interested in is permaculture, and one aspect of this is called no-dig cultivation. The idea of not digging the plot is certainly attractive! But digging is said to break up the soil, improve its structure and help to control weeds. So what will happen if we don’t dig?

The most important aspect of no-dig gardening is mulching. At the end of the season the soil is covered with a deep mulch of organic material. This might be compost, rotted horse manure, leafmould, old straw or spent mushroom compost. The mulch keeps the soil warm, which encourages the natural population of earthworms to remain active. The worms work hard taking the mulch down from the surface into the soil below and, in the process, their tunnels help to aerate and drain the soil, gradually improving its structure. The mulch also helps to retain moisture, and the slower percolation of water through the soil means that fewer nutrients are leached. In addition, the mulch increases the fertility of the soil and suppresses weeds, while the undisturbed soil environment encourages a more balanced soil population with beneficial rather than harmful fungi, resulting in fewer pests and diseases compared to a well-dug soil. Some of the vegetables we plant also help to develop the structure of the soil. Leeks, parsnips and potatoes are particularly good at this.

No-dig vegetable beds are not new to community farming. The Kippax CSA (community supported agriculture) in West Yorkshire practises permaculture, including the no-dig system. The project is organic and doesn’t use agricultural machinery, so they use no-dig beds to save both labour and fossil fuels. They initially found the process of creating the no-dig beds time consuming, but in the longer term reduced the time needed for digging, weeding, watering and, because the crops come out of the soil more easily, harvesting.

The Diss Community Farm is really shaping up now, as you can see from the photos below.  We’re farming only part of the field, but look at the green manure coming up on the rest.  We’ve got a nice new hand hoeing tool, that makes keeping up with the weeds much easier.  Potatoes, brassicas, beans all in progress.

And look at that harvest: loads of spinach, leeks, spring onions, beetroot. Not bad for the hungry gap?

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Last week EU states voted on a proposal to restrict the use of neonicotinoides, pesticides that threaten the survival of bee colonies. The proposal had considerable support but, sadly, not from the UK government.

This is not the first time the European Commission has sought to ban the chemicals. After studying all available evidence, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) concluded that neonicotinoids present an unacceptable danger to bees. In January, in response to the EFSA’s report, the European Commission proposed a two-year suspension of these pesticides, and the proposals would have entered EU law in February if a majority of member states had voted in favour. However, the proposal failed after several countries opposed the suspension while Britain and Germany abstained.

The failure pleased chemical companies Bayer and Syngenta who claimed that the EC “relied too heavily on the precautionary principle”. Defra, similarly, suggested that the EU was rushing the proposal through. The UK environment secretary, Owen Paterson, supported by the government’s chief scientific advisor and by the NFU, asked the EC to postpone the decision and wait for further research.

But, John Gummer (now Lord Deben), former environment minister, criticised Paterson’s stance, saying that bees are too important to take such risks. Almost three-quarters of the UK public support the ban, and last week a petition with 300,000 signatures was delivered to Downing Street, while 2½ million people signed a petition online. Even retailers supported the ban by voluntarily ceasing to stock the chemicals.

More than 30 scientific studies carried out in the last three years have shown that neonicotinoids have a harmful effect on bees. These insect neurotoxins attack bees’ nervous systems and affect memory, learning and navigation. The pesticides have been linked to a 50% fall in both UK and US honey bee numbers over the last 25 years, a doubling of the number of bees that fail to find their way home after foraging for food, and increased sensitivity of hives to parasites and lack of food. Researchers also found an 85% drop in the production of queen bees. Queens are the only members of the colony that survive the winter and are therefore essential for establishing new colonies the following year.

Last week the EC took the proposal to an appeals committee and gained the right to enforce a ban despite members’ failure to agree. It will impose a two-year restriction on the chemicals, beginning no later than 1 December.

In its current incarnation as a shared allotment, the Diss Community Farm field in Winfarthing is in very good shape at present.

A small, but growing group of us have been working their through the winter, and we’ve even got some harvests! (Some leeks and spinach today.)  We are up to about 15 members now, all of whom work regularly on the field, and are open to taking a few more, up to about 20.

We’ve reduced the land we’re working on, and planted a green manure on the rest.  We’ve been building compost bins, fixing up the fences, clearing up from last year’s crops. It’s all looking very tidy, and planting for this season is well under way. Our main work days are Thursday mornings, and also the third Saturday of the month.

Here are some pictures taken today and last week.

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An ecological footprint can be defined as the amount of land required to support the current lifestyle of an individual or community. This isn’t just the land that grows our food but also includes the land needed to produce all the other goods, energy and water that we consume, and to absorb the waste that we produce. It is said that if everyone lived the lifestyle of the average American, we would need five planets to support us.

Trying to reduce our ecological footprint can be very complicated if we try to work out the full impact of everything we buy. Consider something as simple as a strawberry yoghurt. In addition to the production methods of each ingredient and the yoghurt itself, we also have to consider the production and disposal of the packaging and the transport of the yoghurt and its ingredients. American researchers have calculated that the total miles travelled by a strawberry yoghurt and all of its ingredients could be as much as 2216 miles.

However, there is a simpler way to approach the problem. If you think of your house, garden and car as a system that represents your lifestyle, then everything that enters or leaves this system has an environmental impact. So a way to reduce your ecological footprint would be to reduce the things entering or leaving your personal system, and also to simplify them so that it is easier to understand their impact. To give just one example, proprietary brands of cleaning products contain a mix of unfamiliar ingredients, so working out the environmental impact of, say, a bathroom cleaner can be very complex. But most household cleaning can be accomplished with a very small number of basic ingredients including vinegar, salt, lemon juice and bicarbonate of soda. So instead of trying to understand the impact of your current cleaners, just switch to simpler materials. This principle can be applied in many ways including buying fresh local cooking ingredients instead of prepared meals.

Diss Community Farm has a responsibility for both sustainability and education, and the sharing of knowledge and experience within our community of members helps us to reduce our ecological footprint. We are currently exploring this through cooperative buying, initially operating informally by identifying local suppliers who share DCF’s values, together with companies from further afield who supply ethical products that can’t be obtained locally. By placing orders and arranging collection cooperatively we can increase our support of these suppliers and reduce our ecological footprint in the process.

A brief report on Thursday’s activities in the greenhouse at Gabbi’s on the 18th.

We sowed in pots & plugs:Long courgette, a few round courgette, cucumber, butternut squash, ichi kuri squash (misspelt I know), crown prince squash, pumpkins, cobra beans, blau hilde beans, borlotti beans, fennel, drumhead cabbage, pointy cabbage(unofficial name!), calabrese, purple broccoli and sunflowers.

Gabbi has already started quite a few other things, including, leeks, radishes and salad leaves.

Penelope

Modern life is complicated, and developments to improve our lives can have unintended consequences that may not become apparent for some time. There have been several examples in the press recently.

The first relates to two pesticides that have been shown to have adverse effects on bees. One is a group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which protect crops such as oil seed rape. The other is a pesticide called coumaphos, used on beehives to protect the swarm from the Varroa mite. The chemicals are thought to affect the bees’ brain physiology, inactivating the brain cells that bees use when learning, and impairing both memory and the ability to navigate. Bees that cannot learn cannot find food, thus threatening the survival of the whole colony.

In a completely different context, flame retardants are chemicals that inhibit or slow down the spread of fire. They were introduced for our protection, reducing the speed at which fire spreads through household items. For example, many materials used as mattress fillings are highly flammable. Upholstered furniture, curtains and blinds can also burn rapidly if untreated. UK legislation establishes levels of fire resistance for many household products such as these, and flame retardants help manufacturers to meet these standards. However, the chemicals, which can migrate out of the product and can be inhaled as dust or swallowed by young children, have been linked to cancer, lower IQ, developmental problems and decreased fertility.

Finally, concern is increasing over the amount of atmospheric radiation from man-made sources such as wi-fi, mobile phone signals, radio, TV and fluorescent bulbs. The European Assembly notes that our exposure to radio-frequency radiation is gradually increasing as the use of mobile phones, wi-fi and similar devices increases. Scientific studies are inconclusive, but some radiation is thought to be carcinogenic, and the Assembly says that exposure can be “more or less potentially harmful”, and it therefore advices a precautionary approach rather than “waiting for high levels of scientific and clinical proof”. This is especially important in children, who “seem to be most at risk from head tumours”.

But pesticides, flame retardants and various forms of radiation all contribute to what we think of as modern life. Would society without these developments be inferior or more ‘primitive’, or is it wise to moderate their use in order to protect human and environmental health?

Saturday 6th April was a beautiful sunny day on the Farm at Winfarthing. We even got warm! We are nearly at the end of last years crops and beetroot, parsnips, broccoli and chicory were harvested. Compost heaps were made up in our newly constructed bins. Potatoes are chitting in the homes of various members and a grand potato planting day is planned for the next Saturday Farm Day on the 20th.

Vicki Robins, author of Your Money Or Your Life, suggests that “how we spend our money is how we vote on what exists in the world”. In other words, every time we buy something we are giving our support not only to that product but also to its ecological impact, its method of manufacture, its social and economic effects, and so on. Ethical consumerism provides the intriguing promise of enabling us to change the world by simply changing our spending habits. There is a danger here, however, since ethical or ‘green’ consumerism is still consumerism, and we are in jeopardy of surrounding ourselves with ‘eco-bling’ (which architect Howard Liddell defines as the conspicuous consumption of environmental technologies).

An alternative to green consumerism is the ‘voluntary simplicity’ movement. Voluntary simplicity rejects high-consumption, materialistic lifestyles and instead seeks to provide our material needs as simply and directly as possible while minimising expenditure on consumer goods. While society uses an economic measure – GDP or gross domestic product – to measure well-being, the amount that we spend is, in fact, a very inaccurate representation of our happiness or fulfilment. The ‘work-and-spend’ cycle of consumer culture can distract us from what is really important in our lives. Adopting lower levels of consumption allows us to spend less time generating income and more time on real pleasures such as family, friends and neighbours, artistic, intellectual or sporting pursuits, and community projects.

A simple but rewarding pleasure that is important to Diss Community Farm is growing our own vegetables. Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in the nineteenth century about his own vegetable patch, said that “I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.”