Aweside Farm

01/09/2026

So I was trying to do some bookkeeping this morning on my broken phone...

I can't quite see the middle of it and the middle of the phone doesn't respond to touch to select things. So I was essentially doing it with my eyes closed.

I thought I'd go and link up the receipts and transactions of what I put in this morning whilst sat at the on the laptop...

Turns out I've just uploaded a really flattering picture of myself...I think my accountant will be really happy with my bookkeeping....😅

01/09/2026

August was definitely just survival. I'm so glad it's over and I'm feeling a lot more human on the 1st of September.

I think my journey this year has been quite similar to the grass, of slowly withering to the point of complete shrinking and disappearing. I got struck down with some virus which had me in bed most days.

My knee gave out again. I've had an issue over the last 20 years since a dislocation when I was 14. The theory is a piece of my bone chipped off and it's calcified over the years, to the point it's now an 11mm floater just cruising around 🤣 Sometimes that floater get stuck in my joint, and stops my leg from moving. The last 2 years it's got so bad and this year I've had a total of 3 months when my knee hasn't been locked in one position and I've got movement in it. No squatting, no bending, no kneeling. The rest of my body is shreds trying to farm with a knee locked straight. So that is finally getting removed later this month.

And not just one but two phones broke. So I'm back to using my broken phone which just flashes at me and give has given me an eye to itch, in the middle of it doesn't respond to any touch whatsoever 🤣

I think it's all a sign. The end is near 🤣👀🫩

Having had some forced to rest, I am feeling a little bit better this week with a bit more energy. And now we're just pressing on with getting a lot of the winter jobs that I would be working on, done now, as I'm going to be off for a few months and not working on the farm itself from October onwards.

Lots of things happening on the herb block and new ideas to share with you about the other half of the farm I'm beginning to work on and design 😁💕

Love as always, happy September xoxo

30/08/2026

Had the pleasure of being apart of the Indie Farmers project exploring the people, farms and ideas helping to shape the future of farming in and around the High Weald.

Here's more about the journey here on the farm over the past 6 years and how I'm trying to move and step into a new era on the farm and bring back the love to the land.

What does it really take to start a small farm in Britain?I spent...

13/08/2026

Feeling absolutely exhausted this week, head isn't quite in the game, and my body just hasn't got the energy for it. Monday I went to bed at midday 🤣, and stayed there.

I've been calling it a day earlier this week, the exhaustion of working through the heat this season, rebuilding the space, certification work on the SALSA and Organic Processor extension and this knee injury I'm waiting to get surgery on has caught up and I'm also finding flare-ups of old injuries when the heat is particularly rampant!

The flowers have taken an absolutely brutal hit this season. Through as much as we could at it, resowing, watering, feeding, but sometimes it's just not meant to be.

I'm so glad that the herb area is coming on and that I made the decision last year to bring back a lot more perennials. This area is what has saved me this season. And we're just focusing at the moment on doubling down to get all of the new plants in the ground and established.

I'm a mixture of sad and disappointed about the way this season has panned out, but also happy and confident in the direction and plans that I've been working on over the past year to pivot and build in more resilience. I'm just so tired and I'm on countdown to my surgery and being sedated for a few hours for some deep sleep 🤣🤣🤣

Marigolds continue to be impeccable!

Next week I'm going to be looking at doing a load of seed sowing and sorting out the polytunnel for autumn plants and planting for next season! I've largely called it a day on a lot this season's plants, if they make it they make it. If they don't I'll suck it up and get on with it!

09/08/2026

This weekend we've got the digger's back in, my parents are here and we are finalising the new herb garden.

We've got big 6x6 m of beds full of different herbs like chocolate mint, garden mint, Moroccan mint, pineapple mint, lemon thyme, sage, garlic chives, oregano and then we've been building these mounds and in those are Rosemary and different types of thyme, like pine scented thyme, orange, caraway and rose rhymes.

The Rosemary we're going to allow to grow quite large and act as a bit of a windbreak, like a series of buffers across the garden and to provide a bit of shade. The thymes in these beds will act as a ground cover for those mounds.

Everything is irrigated using soaker hoses, and we've actually been doing this across the whole farm. I finally found some which are great.

Pretty much everything here, bar the curly parsley to go in, will be perennial, the idea being to reduce a huge workload of seed sowing and planting out each year. I want to be disturbing the soil as little as possible going forward, with long-term plants that are able to hold their own during things like droughts.

It's been a year-long project. Strimming everything down. Tarping it over. Cutting the tarps down to size. Sowing grasses. We rotavated the beds, so that we could give these roots the biggest chance possible at getting established and plenty of decent drainage going forward. Composting. Planting thousands of plants, most of which we took cuttings from across the farm from. Setting up all this irrigation. Building these mounds largely by wheelbarrow.

I've largely written off a lot of saving the rest of this season and have moved into prepare for next season. I also want to get a lot of the jobs that we've been doing to rebuild the farm over the last couple of years complete, so I can just focus on doing the job next season and not juggling between building work and growing.

We're on a bit of a timeline to get as much done as possible by the 25th of September as that's when I go for surgery, so any big jobs won't be a possibility this winter, so we gotta wrap this up and my countdown clock to resting time!!!!

07/08/2026

Are you a spooner or a shaker??

I'm deciding on the new packaging for our herb range.

I quite like the taller one because I like to shake my herbs into my cooking, but it's a little bit too narrower to get a spoon into comfortably. Now that's not a problem for me because I don't do spoons.

But, getting out of my own mind and thinking about the use case of the packaging, I know some folks like to use a teaspoon and measure out and then put that into their cooking. So the shorter tin allows you to come to comfortably take a teaspoon in and out.

So I'm wondering, what do you do??

06/08/2026

So I haven't been using the propagation tunnel for the last couple of months because it's been absolutely roasting, so we moved all of the tables outside have been doing all the sowing on those.

So I kind of erased propagation tunnels existence from my memory.

And I walked past it and the doors were open from the wind and the shock that went through my veins about the state of it in here!! I think this might be a very stark insight into my object permanence issues🤣

So we got to get this jungle under control, a deep clean and be ready to start sowing some of next year's crops and getting some autumn bits done too next week.

This is a big whoopsie 🤣🫪🫨🥴

05/08/2026

Over the years I've kind of ended up narrowing some of what has been grown on the farm, party by choice, partly by accident.

I think there's a real temptation when you first get started with growing, where you're excited and you want to grow absolutely everything and your first few years you'll find you'll have tons of different stuff.

Then as you learn you whittle down, you specialise, and you hone in on things.

That ended up being a lot of the edible flowers for me and it ended up taking over to the point where the balance felt a little bit off in 2025 and I realised that the majority of the money that comes from this farm is really wrapped up in one type of product - yes sold in different ways, fresh, dried or pressed. But more reliant than I'd like on a small amount of variety all in all.

And if there's anything this year has shown me, it's that if i had just stuck with narrowing down into only the edible flowers, I'd have been absolutely ruined this year, because right now I'm a flower farm with pretty much no flowers.

So last year I started flipping the farm on its head. I needed to start again but I also realised I was just a bit miserable and there was something that felt like it was missing and that I was just working robotically churning out product but a part of my soul had been a little lost in the process.

So I decided to bring back a lot of what I started with, herbs. I've always loved cooking, and it was a whole reason as to why I got into growing in the first place. I wanted to grow flowers to make the cakes that I made look amazing, and I wanted to grow herbs to give the food. I was cooking flavours people haven't come across before. And that last bit somehow got a bit lost.

I'm really excited to show you everything that we've been working on over the past year. As ever I probably should have documented it more and talked about it as I went on. But here we are.

Am essentially returning to my roots, quite literally. The heartache I felt this year of watching the flowers die, has really been buffered by the joy that I'm getting from having flavour back on the farm.

03/08/2026

Aaaaaagh the flea beetle is next level this year.

Each week it is just a big slap in the face with a new form of wipeout

I can't quite muster up much more typing than that

I want to say good luck but I think we might be past that point now 🫥👀🤮🫠😎🤐🤔🫢😐😰

30/07/2026

Alright, the organic inspection is out of the way, went all okay with our usual producer licence and with the new processing licence application, just a form I didn't know about and I've got to get our labels designed and finalised and then sent over for review.

There's often debate around certification and it is arduous and expensive to do and I'll be honest. A couple of years ago I was thinking about stopping and not going ahead with keeping certifications up.

But I changed my chime a lot back to my roots and original thinking last year.

As I myself have got deeper into supplying the wholesale market and understanding more about supply chains and flows of product for edible flowers particularly. It has become quite eye-opening.

So much that you might think is coming from one place, really isn't.

Some of your edible flowers are coming as far as South Africa, which is quite literally the other side of the planet. Which frankly for something that most people push to the side of the plate after the visual impact has been taken in, is pretty ridiculous.

Now there's not much that companies really have to do to say where things are coming from. Basically, you see the name of said place, you think it's them, simple.

For me, I've seen it as by being certified you know it is from here. I have the records. I have the log books. It's all traceable. Everything that lands at your restaurant or your home. I can tell you exactly when it was picked, where it was picked, who it was picked by and what part of this land it came from. And by being organic, you know no chemical has ever touched those flowers.

In a world that feels like it's more post-truth than ever, and that it is so easy to be lied to as a consumer, going through the effort of supporting certifications and a system that is built on trust in traceability feels really important to me.

So that's why I do it. Death by paperwork but it's about a wider picture really.