Spring Updates from the
Flete Field Lab Team

First off, we are so pleased to announce our newly revamped website is live so please check it out.

But where are the Water Police?

We’ve been reminded many times this winter about one of the main reasons we started this small venture three years ago.  Firstly, there’s the heartbreaking plight of rivers in England, with statistics just in for 2023:

• There was a total of 464,056 discharges counted.
• Untreated sewage was discharged for a total of nearly 4 million hours – double than in 2022.
• On average each overflow discharged for almost 8 hours each time a spill took place.

And as if that’s not enough to galvanise action and demands for change at the top level, there’s the epic amounts of rain.

With lashing rain almost every day over what seems like an unusually long time, there cannot be many folk here in Devon unaware of our changing climate.   Heavy and persistent rainfall with resulting disruption to all living beings including humans, alongside impacts on food production; roads becoming streams; soil reaching capacity and unable to hold any more water – these are just a few of the changes we can expect to continue ramping up as we break through various Planetary Boundaries.

But we have some potentially canny natural remedies that just need further trialling both on the field, in the water, and in laboratories.  Flete Field Lab is continuing to make biochar to support soil health and lessen run off, and we are co-creating new mycofiltration trials with five new female students from Schumacher and Plymouth University.  Just some of our new trials include the beautiful Turkey Tail fungi to remove nasties from agricultural run off and also Oyster Fungi to remove lipids from dairy waste water.

Turkey tail mushrooms.                             Our new associate Honor Wolf Moon

Our core team is growing, with Honor Wolf Moon joining as an associate, and our previous (award-winning) student Rhianna Trim is supporting the new cohort and our ongoing mycofiltration work.

To add to this already robust and multi-talented team we have incredible volunteers from WATER (Wild About the Erme River) and Force For Nature (Til the Coast is Clear) as well as a group of Fungiphiles who are helping to create a fungi garden on our site near Yealmpton.

Volunteers helping out.

So don’t feel helpless in the face of the changes we’re seeing.  Learning from and walking alongside nature is not only a powerfully positive thing to do, it is also massively uplifting, endlessly fascinating and often involves some pretty awesome humans too.

     

To find out more, check out our new website, and to support us share our story with your friends and family.  There’ll soon be a seismic shift in our human/nature relationship which will be healing for us and the planet.

In the meantime, sign up here to receive information on workshops, events and volunteer days.

For more information on our rivers visit the State of our Rivers report

Shelley and Frank
Co-Directors, Flete Field Lab CIC