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Cherry-picking Pigeons, Amazon Smile, and Climate Change Impact on Insects

This continued warm weather is bringing on the soft fruit at a pace and the gooseberries are almost ready for picking. When in the orchard today, I also see that the pigeons have already had a go at the developing cherries on the trees so will be needing the nets up asap. Last year they had every cherry on the 6 trees that we have so we’re keen this doesn’t happen this time round!

With the Royal Wedding occasion happening this weekend, we seem to have had a flurry of wedding reception enquiries. We still have a few dates remaining for this year if you know of anyone that is still looking for a location. For information, the difference between us and other wedding venues is that we can provide organic fresh produce from site along with flowers and the revenue goes into our charity, which is obviously non-profit making.

We have recently signed the charity up to the Amazon Smile facility that will give 0.5% back on purchases made through their internet shopping facility. This is their way of giving back to charities. If you are an Amazon user, if you log into smile.amazon.co.uk, this is the same as logging into their standard account with all the same facilities; you will be able to nominate a charity. If you annotate this with ‘Tuppenny Barn Education’, we will then receive 0.5% less VAT and postage on any purchases. It would be tremendous if any of you would like to do this on our behalf. If anyone has any queries on this, please do come back to me.

You will no doubt have been receiving many GDPR emails of late with the commencement of the new regulations at the end of the week. I want to make you aware of our recently updated privacy policy. Just to re-assure you all that we don’t pass any personal data to any third party.

I read this weekend that global warming is on track to cause a major wipeout of insects, compounding already severe losses, according to a new analysis. If climate change could be limited to a temperature rise of 1.5 C – the goal of the Paris agreement – the loss of insects would be far lower. The research is the most comprehensive to date finding that plants would also be heavily affected but that mammals and birds, which can more easily migrate as climate changes, would suffer less. Insects were shown to be the most sensitive group and ecosystems could not function without insects. They play an absolute critical role in the food chain. Having read these facts and then being told that Southbourne will more than likely be subjected to more housing development, some very near to Tuppenny Barn, I fear for the long term biodiversity of our site.