Olivia Cliff is a grower of common British plants, and a registered Herbalist of 13 years experience. She is well practiced in making the most of garden intruders, the wild plants known as weeds, for their varied dietary, nutritional and medicinal benefits.

‘Growing Weeds’ is a five part course, taught at Coed Hills Rural Art Space, Olivia will teach participants how valuable and easy these garden intruders can be to grow, harvest and enjoy.

She will transform our understanding of unwanted weeds, and help us realize that they can form a valuable, healthy and delicious addition to our food-gardens.

“If you can’t beat them, eat them!”

On this 5 part course, we’ll learn to grow, harvest and prepare common garden weeds, for their nutritional, dietary and medicinal benefits.

We focus on twenty five key ‘weeds’, although around fifty will be comprehensively introduced.

These plants all grow wild in Britain, and often invade even the most disciplined of gardens, so we’ll learn how to identify them, and also sustainably wild-craft them in addition to learning about their preferred habitats, propagation techniques and how to maximize yield.

We’ll explore various methods of storing these foods for out-of-season use.

We’ll learn about each plant’s nutritional benefits, and various methods of safely factoring them into our daily diets.

Each session will present a different angle on nutrition, health and wellbeing.

Mornings will be spent in the garden, learning about growing and harvesting these weeds in their habitats. Afternoons will focus on preparation and storage of the harvested foods. We aim to offer a complete educational overview, and opportunity to transform our definitions of ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ plants in our food-gardens.

The sessions are a complete and comprehensive course, but can also be attended as stand alone workshops.

The courses cost £55 per day full price, £40 for concessions. You can book your place using the form here.
Please get in touch if you require further information.

Session 1 Saturday 11th May, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Introduction to Weeds as foods, Raw and Fresh Plant Juices

In this first workshop we introduce participants to the theory of growing, harvesting and eating weeds. We cover the basic principles underlying good nutrition.

We learn techniques of identifying and harvesting fresh plants, and a variety of methods to enjoy them as delicious food.

An introduction is also be made to the benefits of juicing weeds.

Chickweed, Cleavers and Stinging Nettles will be our main focus during this session.

Session 2 Saturday 15th June, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Preserving Weeds – Infusions, Broths, Tinctures and Vinegars

The second workshop provides an overview of the digestive system, and focuses on the health benefits of growing and eating Chamomile, Mint, Fennel, Dandelion, Burdock, Thistle and Artichoke.

We explore tea-making and broths as forms of enjoying these weeds, and look at drying and storing these food-plants for winter use.

We also study other methods of preserving weeds, such as tinctures and vinegars.

Session 3 Saturday 13th July, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Eating Weeds to Raise Immunity

The third workshop looks at how to use your wild food-plants as natural immunity boosters, to help you avoid catching colds.

We’ll study often unwanted plants like the Elder tree, Wild Cherry, Mallow, Plantain and Elecampagne as well as more coveted plants such as Thyme.

We’ll make syrups and honeys, delicious methods of preserving your edible weeds, with the added benefit of fighting coughs, colds and viruses.

Session 4 Saturday 17th August, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Weeds as Basic First Aid Remedies

During the fourth session we take a look at common weeds which can be employed to treat cuts, grazes, sprains, strains and burns; Marigolds, Comfrey, Yarrow and the humble Daisy. We will be making herbal infused oils and then transforming those oils into ointments and balms for external use.

Session 5 Saturday 14th September, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Medicinal and Cosmetic Creams

The magic and art of cream making will be unveiled and we will learn how to make creams for both medicinal and cosmetic use. True beauty, however, comes from within and we will be reminding ourselves of the principles, and practice of healthy eating. Roses will be our primary concern. Also Hawthorn, Horse chestnut and many of the plants we have already covered will be revisited.

The post Growing Weeds – The Healthy Foods we can’t get rid of appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

It’s been a long, wet and cold winter, but we’ve been keeping ourselves busy by creating new landforms and access paths in the forest garden. With funding help from Environment Wales, the brilliant digger skills of Huw Jones Plant Hire, and our fantastic volunteer team we’ve made some serious renovations to the garden this season.

We’ve added over 120m of  access track, that will aid in getting around the garden and also help us to divide the area into more manageable chunks. These a long with a new vehicle access track have been made with local stone from Seth Hills Quarry just a few miles down the road.

We’ve added new gullies to our water management system, aiding us in controlling the water across the site, and helping to fill our newly created wildlife pond. This in turn has created new bunds and mounds for us to plant, giving the garden a more dynamic land form whilst creating more favourable micro-climates for our more tender plants.

We’ve planted a new area of coppice for production of poles for mushroom growing,  planted lots more edible hedge and most importantly more damson trees!!

We’re now under way with the creation of the garden’s new fungi lab, which has been delayed due to the poor weather. This really exciting element of the project will provide a space for the propagation and multiplication of edible and medicinal fungi in the forest garden, and will in the future be able to provide spawn to other growers.

We’d like to send out a huge THANK-YOU to all those who have been involved, both physically and for advice. We couldn’t make this all happen without you.

Here’s to a very exciting 2013 for the project!

The post Forest Garden Site Development Update March 2013 appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

The Greater Butterfly Orchid (Platanthera chlorantha). One of the highlights of the last years surveys.

As one of our funding goals for Environment Wales this year, we we’re asked to create survey records of the flora and fauna that can be found across the Coed Hills site. Our site is 180acres, and has a great range of habitats, more than anyone person could manage! So to help in this quest, and to encourage more people to get involved with our projects, we’ve been getting local natural history and conservation groups to visit, or to arrange surveys. So far we’ve  had 3 visits and 1 set of records, but there’s many more lined up for the coming year. The ARC Trust will be surveying our ponds, the Glamorgan Bird Group will be helping us record our avian friends, and our ongoing link with the Coity Wallia Commons Biodiversity Enhancement Project will hopefully see the start of a monthly ecology workshop day. We’ll be holding a week long fungi foray, and a bio-blitz later in the year.

So far most of the record data has been made by myself. It’s taken me quite a while to compile all of this! And it’s barely the tip of the iceberg! I’d like to say a huge thanks to my tutors on the ecology program at Aberystwyth University and all those at Denmark Farm for all the inspiration and giving me such a great foundation of knowledge to build on

There are a good number of ancient woodland indicator plants in the botanical survey, showing that our woodland is not just the plantation it appears to be. If you don’t want to scan through all of the text documents, have a look at the gallery below to see some of the highlights.

With help from friends and ecology groups we hope to create an excellent set of records for the Coed Hills site, and these PDF documents contain the just the beginnings.

Flowering Plants.pdf

fungi, lichen and slime moulds.pdf

Insects.pdf

Mosses and Liverworts.pdf

Birds.pdf

Amphibians and Reptiles.pdf

grasses, sedges, rushes.pdf

Small Mammals.pdf

The post Coed Hills site survey records 2012-2013 now available! appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

As an ongoing part of the work in the forest garden, we have been conducting surveys and encouraging the involvement of local recording groups with the whole of the Coed Hills Site.

Today’s visit from the Glamorgan Bird Group was an introduction for them to the site, and excellent chance for Gill Clay and I to pick up on some expert knowledge.  I’ll post up the findings as they come in.

We’re now planning for an open public bird walk later on in the season, and I’m aiming to have an identification course held here some time this year. Watch this space!

The post Glamorgan Bird Group visits Coed Hills appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

As part of the program we are now running in association with the National Botanical Garden of Wales, as part of their ‘Growing the Future’ project, we held two full day courses led by Stephen Watts.

The first course looked at the theory and techniques behind fruit tree and bush pruning. This very practical course helped the participants with the decision making processes and techniques to keep plants healthy and productive. Formative, maintenance and radical recovery pruning we’re covered over the course of the day, which was enjoyed by all.

The second of the weekend courses covered the grafting of apple trees, using scion wood gathered from the forest garden on the previous days pruning course. We had a good turn out and managed to graft over 70 trees in a day, and most people took a tree or two home, helping us to maintain the heritage varieties we have in the garden.

We’ll be running further grafting courses later in the year for other types of fruit tree.

The post Pruning and Grafting weekend courses a great success! appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

As part of the college’s annual Sustainability Conference, a group of their students joined us for an afternoon workshop. After a quick tour of the site, and a brief explanation of the concepts behind Forest gardening, we got down to some physical work.
The conditions were far from friendly, sleet filled rain and cold winds, but despite all this the group were cheerful and got a lot done. They helped to extend our new path system and prepare new beds for this years plantings. It’s great to have a new group from Atlantic college come to the gardens, and we hope to see more of them over their time here.

The post Afternoon workshop with Atlantic College 21st March appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

The new year has bought with it a great opportunity for the Forest Garden Project. We are now working in conjunction with the National Botanical Garden of Wales to provide courses, and operate as a education hub, for their Growing the Future Project.

The project is funded from 2012 – 2015 by money from the Welsh Government and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development under the Knowledge Transfer Scheme. Their aims are to deliver low cost, high quality courses, training people in many different aspects of food growing. Courses are being delivered from their site at the National Botanical Garden of Wales as well as a number of other hubs across the country.

We have recently delivered 2 days of our ‘Introduction to Forest Gardening’ Course, the first taught by Rich Wright and the second by Jess Clynewwod. We had great participants, and feels good to be sharing our knowledge at a new site.

The Forest Garden Project at NBGW is being designed and created by Sally Hedger, a core member of the Growing the Future team. It’s looking great already, and it’s brilliant to see this type of design being included at a national visitor centre.

We will be continuing to deliver courses from our site, and putting on some more advanced courses later in the year. Check out their website, and our courses and events page to keep informed on upcoming events.

The post New Courses with Growing the Future at The National Botanical Garden of Wales appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

Jess Clynewood and Rich Wright

We are really proud, and a little suprised, to announce that we’ve won the Keep Wales Tidy Biodiversity Improvement Award 2012!

A big thank you goes out to all the volunteers that have helped us over the last 3 years to make the garden a success. We’re very excited about the coming year for the project, with many new additions including a fungi lab and a plant nursery, funded by Environment Wales. With all this new work we need your help more than ever. We’ll be advertising for volunteer placements in the near future. If your interested please contact us.

There’s more good news. We’re now working in association with the National Botanical Garden of Wales to provide workshops and courses for their ‘Growing the Future’ campaign. You can find out more about courses on offer at the gardens and here at Coed Hills Rural Art Space by visiting their site or viewing the events section on our website.

Checkout our blog and our facebook page to find out more about the project, events, volunteering and visiting.

We hope to see you all soon!

The post Winners of the Keep Wales Tidy Biodiversity Improvement Award 2012! appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

The Scarlet Elf Cups (Sarcoscypha sp.) have to be one of the most eye catching spring fungi on the woodland floor. Their bright red cups (apothecia) cling to the sticks and smaller woody debris, lighting up amongst the mosses, in damper areas through late winter and spring. We had a great adventure looking for Spring Elves with a good friend Russel and his young daughter, Evren, who made up songs for us while we searched, only finding the red cups that they had been waiting in all winter, but these were magic enough! They are an edible species, although they lack any strong flavour of their own, and are probably best left to be enjoyed where they are.

They are a member of the division Ascomycota, a distinct seperation in the Kingdom of fungi, in which the fruiting bodies (sporocarps) do not grow gills from which to drop their spores (Basidiomycota), but instead fire spores from microscopic structures called asci which, in this case,  are kept on the bright red inner surface of the cup (apothecia).

These asci contain 8 ascospores each. They occur in many shapes and sizes particular to each species.

There are 2 known members of this genus in the UK (Spooner, Larger Cup Fungi pt.4, 2002), and these are very difficult to tell apart, other than by microscopic identification. These are Sarcoscypha coccinea and S.austriaca. The former was at one time considered to be the only UK species, with most field guides only covering this species, but in recent years this has changed greatly with records showing this to now be the rarer of the two.

Having not had the time to correctly identify which species we have here last year, I’ve been eagerly waiting for this season to find out. Based on the plant communities and host specificity outlined by H.O. Baral and Tübingen in 2004, and the few records on the NBN gateway, I was leaning on the side of S.coccinea. The areas of the woods, where they are found here, is prodominatly Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) mixed with Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra),  with a ground cover of Ramsons (Allium ursinum) and Lesser Celendine (Ranunculus ficaria). It’s hard to tell which dead branches they are growing on, as they are well rotted and covered in moss. Based on their locality to the trees they could have come from, I think they are growing on both Ash and Wych Elm. This would fit the habitat for S.coccinea according to this information.

So with a few fresh samples from this years flush, I have worked through the microscopic and macroscopic identification. In the field a useful feature is the very edge (margin) of the apothecia (see details here), which in S.coccinea has a fine hairy - comb tooth like surface, and in S.austriaca is more complete,  or unevenly thick ridged. My specimen was already starting to look like the more common S.austriaca.

Margin close up of S.austriaca

The next thing to check is the microscopic hairs that form on the outside surface (excipulum) of the apothecia. Using a scarp scalpel or razor blade a shallow 2mm scrape of the tissue is taken and placed on microscope slide. This is then divided into smaller portions, then a drop of water (or suitable stain) is added, before gently squashing the material under the cover slip using the rubber on the end of a pencil. When viewed under a high power biological microscope (x100 – x400) the hairs can be seen clearly on the outer edge of the squashed material. In S.conccinea these hairs are slightly wavy (sinuous) to straight, but in S.austriaca they are curly or coiled like silly string……..just like mine.

excipular hairs of S.austriaca

The final thing to check is the ascospores, particularly looking at the ends of the spores, and making sure to look at a good selection as they are quite variable. In S.coccinea the spores have rounded ends (see here), where as in S.austriaca the ends can be rounded, flattened (truncate) or notched.

A spore of S.austriaca showing the truncate ends.

So with all my data gathered it’s clear that the species we have here is S.austriaca. I’d be very interested to find out if this is the case across the Vale of Glamorgan, and if the previous records are incorrectly identified. If you think you have this species growing near you then please get in touch so I can look in to this further.

The post Tales of the Scarlet Elf Cup appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

The Coed Hills Forest Garden team are proud to announce that they have been shortlisted for the prestigious Tidy Wales Awards 2012.

The awards, hosted by Keep Wales Tidy and sponsored by Environment Agency Wales, recognise community groups, schools and organisations across Wales who have worked hard to improve their local environment. Entries have been received from across Wales for this year’s awards and the standard has been higher than ever.

We have been invited to attend the prestigious award ceremony in the Pierhead Building, Cardiff Bay on the 27^th of February 2013 where the winners will be announced by the Minister for the Environment and Sustainability, John Griffiths.

Of the seven award categories,the Forest Garden project havs been shortlisted for the Biodiversity Improvement Award which is sponsored by John Lewis.

Helen Cahill, Community Liaison Co-ordinator of John Lewis said:

“This is the first year that John Lewis Cardiff have been asked to sponsor the biodiversity award. Our partners at the store have been involved in developing habitat creation projects with the support of Keep Wales Tidy in schools and parks around Cardiff and we are delighted to support and encourage the development of biodiversity projects throughout Wales with the obvious benefits that these types of projects bring to benefit communities and habitat management.”

We’re feeling proud to have been shortlisted, this is looking to be a great year for the Forest Garden!

The post Coed Hills Forest Garden Shortlisted for Tidy Wales Awards 2012! appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

It’s my favorite time of year once more. The sunlight has taken on that timeless golden glow, the leaves are changing colour, and smells that burst with nostalgia fill the air. All of that and it’s fungi season!

As part of the ongoing survey work of the forest garden and the surrounding areas at Coed Hills, a good friend of mine, Iona Frazer from the Sussex Fungi Group, and I, have conducted a  fungi survey over a few sessions, recording everything we could identify.

During the week we also lead a walk and workshop at the Coity Wallia Common, which is covered in another post here.

Visitors to Coed were invited to come and see what we were up to and to see some of the microscopic features we use for identification down the microscope.

Helvella atra, spores and asci

We identified 44 species in total, and had many more that we didn’t have the time to get through. We will keep adding to this list to build up a better picture.

The species list from this foray is as follows :

See below for images of some of these species taken on the foray. If you are interested in finding out more about fungi, either their ecology, identification or cultivation, please visit the fungi section of this site.

The post Fungi Survey with Iona Frazer appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.

It’s October, and we’ve just about recovered from the Permaculture Convergence that was held on site last month. The event has brought many new people through Coed Hills, and there is a revived buzz in the air.

One of the forest gardens latest allies is Peter Hill from the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation  Trust (ARC), who is heading up their  ‘Reconnecting South Wales’ Dragons’ programme of habitat creation and linkage. We’ve teamed up to put on 3 days of workshops for Atlantic college (St. Donats) in the construction of Hugelkultur mounds. So what on earth is that i hear you say?….

Simply, a Hugelkultur mound is a large pile of wood buried under a layered top soil. And why would you do that?…

A Hugel heap offers a number of benefits to growing plants and also provides excellent habitat fo a whole host of wildlife. For the plants the buried wood provides :

• An ongoing supply of slow release nutrients, stored in the wood, that is made available by fungi and other microorganisms in the decomposition process.
• A self-tilling soil. As the roots and logs decay they move, aerating the soil.
• A greater growing space for the area used. The piles are tall, and the angled sides increase the growing area.
• A South side, in our case with added reflection from the pond in front, for light loving plants, and a North side for shade tolerant plants.
• A warmer soil, and therefore a longer growing period, due to the heat given off during decomposition.

For the wildlife the gaps and hollows in the mounds provide a haven for many species, including :

• Frogs and Toads (excellent slug predators)
• Small Mammals
• Many insects and other invertebrates.
• Snakes and lizards, who can use the mounds heat to thermoregulate.

 The construction of the mounds is simple enough. First, a trough is dug, 20cms deep accross the area that you want to create your heap in. Sepp Holzer recommends using a digger for most of the work, we used the superior power of 20 Atlantic college students.

 The next stage is to create piles from the wood that you have gathered. A mixture of diameters, lengths and ages is best. We used fresh cut Ash, well rotted Spruce, old Oak, scrap building timber(with nails removed) and hedgerow cuttings. The piles need to be at least 1.5m high, starting with the bulkier pieces of wood and moving up to brash for the top coat.

The pile is then covered with 10cms of well rotted horse manure, and all of the soil that had been taken out to form the trench is added back on top of this.

We were careful to leave some gaps in the base of the piles to allow mammals and amphibians to find their way in. The mounds will be planted with a ground cover of clover and yarrow and then next spring with perenial vegetables, herbs and fruit.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what moves in to the pile, and how it benefits the residents of the adjacent pond. I’ll keep you all posted.

More a more detailed look at the technique written by Sepp Holzer can be found here.

Many thanks to Peter Hill (ARC Trust) and everyone from Atlantic College for making it a success and an enjoyable few days.

The post Hugelkulture Beds with ARC Trust and Atlantic College appeared first on Coed Hills Forest Garden.