In July DCAN members were given a tour of The Climate Project ay Cock Crowing Farm, Eype, followed by a picnic and a walk to Eype beach for a swim.

Lucy Sommers and Chit Chong have created an experimental farm, which includes an orchard and wildflower meadow. The climate resistant multi crop orchard, building on principles for sustainable forests of the future and incorporating the principles of agro-ecology contains a wide variety of species adapted to different climates:

• # Nut trees planted included Almonds (early and late flowering), Pecans, Walnuts, Stone Pines, Cob nuts, Sweet Chestnuts.
• # Fruit trees include Apricots, Apricot/plum hybrid, Persimmon varieties, mulberry, medlar, quince, French plum Mirabelle de Nancy, Asian pears Kumoi and Shinseiki, select apple varieties eg Sunset, Sea buckthorn Leikora & other cultivars, American pawpaws, kiwi fruit cultivars.
• # Fruit bushes include: Winterberry, Japanese Wineberry, honey berry, Korean raspberry, Elaeagnus goumi and Elaeagnus umbellata.
• # Vegetable trees include Szechuan Pepper trees, Toona Sinensis (stir fry leaves!), Tilia cordata (small leafed lime).
• # Three different types of edible bamboo, we have plum yews and an experimental log planting injected with mushroom spores carried out by Nick Phillips, (Grown up Mushrooms).

The meadows and hedges are planted with different mixes of grsses and wildflower plants to identify and produce food and flowering plants which can better cope with the less predictable and extreme weather which climate change is bringing (at the same time as improving the level of carbon sequestration in the soil).

After Lucy and Chit’s extensive tour of the farm, we enjoyed a sharing picnic in the shade, then a walk down to Eype beach where some of us swam.

For further information on Lucy and Chit’s project, email Lucy or Chit