The year is coming to a close. Today the darkness has reached its peak. The sun stands still. And we all await its turning. The days feel very short. It feels some days like it barely gets light.

Hirnos. The longest night.

Winter Solstice. Solstice, from the latin ‘Sol’ (sun) and ‘Sistere’ (to stand still), is a time of pause. Believed by some to be the oldest seasonal festival, the Winter Solstice, or Midwinter, is celebrated around the world by a variety of cultures. It marks the shortest day of the year (the longest night), and when the sun is at its lowest on the horizon. It’s a time to herald the rebirth of the sun and rejoice in the returning of the light. Brighter days are ahead and Spring isn’t far away!

As we stand still on this seasonal turning, and stop for break for the first time in many months, we want to reflect on everything that has happened in the last 12 months. To celebrate all that has been achieved - an unbelievable amount in just one year! We’ve been so busy on the farm, working every hour of the day to build the farm, that we haven’t been as active on social media, here on our blog or in sending out updates to our email subscribers this year. So we thought the best thing would be to put together a photo essay by way of a review of the year, to give you a sense of the highlights (there’s way too much to fit into one blog!). We’ve been lucky to work with some great photographers this year, so we also wanted to show off their work!

Two years ago….. we shared with you the biggest news - that we would become the new custodians of the 134-acre National Trust farm, Parc yr Arglwydd | Lords Park farm in Llansteffan, southwest Wales. Just 9 miles from where we began, this presented a rare and exciting opportunity to grow the work we’d been doing in the area for local food, food security, education and community building, widen our impact, reach and offering, and to secure a long-term home for Glasbren and our work. It was a big leap of faith - we put alot of trust in our vision, our team, our community and support network, and that we had the strength, strategy and a robust plan for how we’d put our shoulders to this big wheel, and get it moving.

Well, if the first year was about fund-raising, calling out for support for our vision and what we planned to do here, this year has been about building it - with the help and hope of so many hands. Our farm team, our directors, our HelpX and WWOOF exchange volunteers and our local volunteering community have pulled off the impossible and helped fulfilling a promise we made when we reach out for your help 18 months ago.

In July 2024, we watched on jubilantly as your Crowdfunder donations took us sailing past our target of £40,000 to raise an incredible total of £43,866 - vital funds we needed to grow into our new chapter at Lords Park farm and to unlock the potential we know this place holds for nature, people and planet.

And you really did. Not only has the money raised by the Crowdfunder been vital to kickstart the transformation of the farm and taking the first steps to realise our plans for it, but the enthusiasm with which 237 of you threw your hard-earned cash behind us has been the wind in our sails for the past 18 months, it was a swelling tide to help get us afloat and sailing. It was a loud and clear mandate to go ahead and do it, and an affirmation of the trust and faith you have always placed in us - and on the strength of which we took on this mad opportunity!

In exchange for your generous donations, we offered a host of extra special rewards, including trees, wheelbarrows and benches with a view in your name or the name of a loved one, in person experiences like workshops, mentoring or foraging walks, Glasbren tote bags, pay-it-forward veg boxes - as well as rewards donated by friends of the project like restaurant vouchers, books and shiatsu treatments!

As part of a patchwork of funding that has included support from the Real Farming Trust to buy a tractor, Carmarthenshire County Council, the FORE, the Tree Council and the LUSH Spring Prize (some other big news from 2025!) to help establish our agroecologcial growing spaces, this support in the early goings have meant that we have been able to hit the ground running this year.

Food systems & Food Growing Spaces

This season we quickly established hundreds of metres of veg growing beds, green manure cover crops to prepare future ground, and got polytunnels up in time for a bumper Summer crop!

Turned concrete into life….and food!

As well as building two tunnels in the Spring, we also took the bold move to remove an old concrete slurry pit to make way for an extra large tunnel - transforming land that was buried under 300 tonnes of concrete into productive, biodiverse food producing land, nicely nestled out of the wind on the edge of the historic farm footprint (see images below).

*Putting in water supplies for polytunnels*

*Community-scale agriculture at work - the first planting in Cae Pant in April 2025*

*A rotational chicken tractor - Le Palais de Poulet - working through the Community Orchard*

Our team has grown…

In the closing days of last year, we found Will and Sam, our new co-head growers. They were an obvious choice to steward our veg growing operations into this new, ambitious chapter on a much larger site. Starting properly in March 2025, they were thrown in the deep end, establishing 5 large veg growing blocks, sowing seeds and helping to build tunnels all at the same time! They bring with them a blended experience of different types of agroecological veg growing and time spent at some very successful market gardens and farms around the country, including starting their own on the Cornish coast - good preparation for the windy coastal growing conditions of Lords Park! In their first season here, they have proven their worth, resilience and experience over and over - and brought in a hefty harvest for our CSA members, often against the odds! Hiring them has been one of the best moves we’ve made, and was absolutely central to getting moving so quickly and being ready to start sharing our harvest with our CSA veg box member again in 2025.

Dr Morgan Jones (above) joined Steffan, Laura, Luisa and Abel as our fifth director back in early Spring. Morgan has been part of the Glasbren community (nearly) since the beginning - joining as a veg box member with her husband in 2019. Since then she has been one of our greatest supporters, seeing her involvement as her way of protest against current food and environmental practices, and advocating for real food, community and working with nature

Morgan is a Lecturer in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Aberystwyth University and, as a glacial geologist, she has seen the climate and environment changing at an alarming rate during her career. Joining Glasbren feels like practicing what she preaches and she is keen to get as many people to feel the magic of Glasbren and its community as possible.

With a background in events management, she now helps with the operational side of the farm - helping with the organisation of our bigger events, managing our veg box list and doing administrative tasks. Morgan and Josh believe in Glasbren and its community to the extent that they are moving to be closer to the farm!

Paddy Fraine (pictured above) has made a huge impact on the farm and in our team this year. He’s worked mostly on buildings and infrastructure, helping raise three polytunnels, build raised beds and over the last six months, a shepherds hut from scratch. He’s also always been on hand for repairs and maintenance and to sing a song or two to lift our spirits. We sadly say goodbye to Paddy this week, as he moves up to Shrewsbury to step into his own new chapter as a father. He’ll be such a loss to our team, not only in what he contributes practically and the work that he does, but more so his positive, hopeful spirit, and his willingness to dive into any challenge - especially the grade-A fun ones! He is beloved in our community, and will be sorely missed.

As we say goodbye to Paddy, we are excited to say hello to a new team member in the new year - Chloe (above left)! Chloe has volunteered alot on the farm, and was with us for six weeks in the Summer - a vital help in the busiest part of the growing season and as we pulled together a harvest celebration. Now that she has completed her level 2 horticulture at Black Mountain College, we will be hiring her as an Assistant Grower, through which she’ll also complete her Level 3 with College Cambria.

We’re excited to see what Chloe will bring, and how more team capacity will transform the farm in 2026!

*Out delivering every Friday throughout the three rivers estuary….*

We bought a tractor…..

Thanks to a low-interest loan from the Real Farming Trust’s LEAP programme, we were able to invest in a vital piece of kit for a farm of this size and ambition - a tractor. You can hear more about our experience with LEAP in the video below, bit their support has been invaluable. Not only have they supported us to buy a tractor well-suited to our needs and the diverse jobs we need to use it for, but they also provided business mentoring, support and are a flexible, compassionate lender well versed in the realities and challenges facing small-scale agroecological community-based farms. We do still need a name for the tractor - any ideas?!

And started our herd of Longhorn cattle….

In May 2025, we welcomed our first cattle to the farm - 5 beautiful Longhorns, sold to us by Robert Vaughan of Carn Edward in the Preseli mountains. We’ve carefully selected Longhorns for the role they can play in ecological regeneration and transformation of the land. Their grazing and browsing habits, dunging, disturbascnes made in soil and bramble and their proximity, genetically, to their Auroch ancestors make them the ideal choice for our work in trying to deliver nature-rich meadows here at the farm. They are beautiful animals, and look so majestic, and right, browsing with a view of a 12th century castle. It’s like they’ve always been here.

We opened a Farm Shop!

At our Harvest Celebration in early September, we opened the day with the grand opening of our new Honesty farm shop! In a historic cow barn on the edge of the public footpath as it passes through the farm, and just a few metres from our market garden where the vegetables are grown, the farm shop is now the perfect stop for passers by on their way around Wharley Point. It’s also a great option for those who can’t commit to a weekly veg box. As well as a range of vegetables from the fields here, we also have local honey, our Community Apple Juice, local, pasture-raised eggs and some added extras like mushrooms. We also have a tea and coffee station, where you can pick up a cuppa, by donation, as you pass by on your walk. We’re excited to develop the shop over the coming year, adding flower bouquets, local crafts and other local food stuffs as well as what we produce here on the far. Come and pay us a visit! The shop is open from 8am to 8pm 7 days a week.

We won the LUSH Spring Prize!

And welcomed our Community to the farm in many different ways….

There is so much on the horizon - this is only the beginning. In 2026, we’re growing our veg box membership, welcoming a Volunteer Coordinator to our team, we have an exciting programme of events planned, and will be opening the farm to ecotourists for the first time. And thanks to funding from Sustainable Steps Wales’ Egin grant, Little Stewards will be launching in it’s full capacity, offering nature-based sessions for children of all ages here on the farm! We’re planting a nut orchard in the Spring, digging ponds, building a wheelchair accessible compost toilet and starting to grow flowers for market - and all the while involving our growing community every step of the way.

*Our board of directors work on our* *mission and values* *and 2026 plans at our Strategy weekend in November*

There is so much more to say about 2025. Hundreds more moments and achievements that could be acknowledged. It’s been the fullest of years. In many ways the hardest of years - its asked alot of all of us. But as we come to the end of it, there is so much joy in what’s been achieved - and that is because we have achieved it all together - directors, farm team, many, many volunteers, supporters, organisational partners, funders and a sense of a swelling tide lifting this up, even on the hardest days.

Glasbren has grown organically from the grassroots, and is built on passion, integrity and an unwavering commitment to a regenerative future. We’ve done it on a shoestring, and every part of the project bears the mark of our volunteers and supporters, donations of time and resources, reclaimed materials and low-cost innovation - of belief that another world, another way is possible, and essential. Our founders and farm team have worked tirelessly the last few years, often without a wage, to keep Glasbren growing through a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis, through uncertain times and dig-deep kinds of times.

This year has shown us what it was all for.

We want to say a huge thankyou to everyone who has supported us this year, and throughout our life as an organisation - diolch o galon i chi gyd. Here’s to another big year in 2026! If you’d like to support Glasbren in 2026, there are a few ways you can do it.