It has been a busy week with the lead up to the Stansted Garden Show that I have just returned from. We had a successful show and the sun shone throughout which is always a bonus. It was lovely to see some of our veg bag customers coming to our stall and hope those that did, enjoyed the show. I also had a delightful morning at Oakwood School on Saturday judging their minature garden competition. Lots of the children entered so it was quite a difficult task to undertake. It was heartening to see so much enthusiasm put into the building of their own unique gardens.
As usual, it is now looking towards our next big event which is our Open Day on Sunday 24th June which runs from midday until 4pm. We take the opportunity to showcase what we do at Tuppenny Barn, and this year, there will be the opportunity to meet some rural crafts people demonstrating their various crafts. We will have our ever popular cream tea tent with our home made scones, clotted cream preserves and cakes and also a PYO opportunity in the large fruit cage where the berries are now coming on a pace. We will have activities for the children with Adrian, our lovely bee keeper, who will be giving a talk on the bees. Christine, if persuaded, might do one of her popular folklore and hedgerow tours. There will be lots of plants for sale as well as our latest preserves. Talking of which, we now have dried some lemon verbena leaves for tea bags so are selling these in the shop.
Last week, we took delivery of some Turtle string bags in order to try and encourage our shoppers to use these instead of plastic carriers whenever they are out and about. They are very handy to have in your handbag or similar and are made from organic cotton in India. We are now stocking these in the shop and they come in 2 sizes of short or long handles costing either £5 or £6. We are still investigating different types of biodegradable or reusable bags or packaging for the shop and veg bag scheme and will shortly give you an update on where we are at. Another new shop item is beeswax from the hives. Christine has done much cleaning and melting to construct the beeswax blocks and says they can be used for natural furniture polish, making cosmetics, filling worm holes in furniture, putting on saw blades and woodworking tools to prevent rust and ease use to name but a few.
If anyone wants tickets for the HandleBards Rome and Juliet production on 27th July they are selling fast so recommend you book fairly soon.
Tomorrow, Sarah Hughes will be welcoming students onto our very first wildflower identification workshop.