Offices B140 - B143
New Covent Garden Market
Nine Elms Lane
London
SW8 5PA
Tel : 020 7627 8066
Fax : 020 7627 4698
info@farmaround.co.uk
JULY NEWSLETTER 2002

Dear Customer,

It has been a horrendous, cold, sunless, wet spring and early summer on the farms. At Riverford Organics in Buckfastleigh, Devon they are saying that it is the worst in memory. Riverford comprises 12 farms with a combined land area of 600 acres in a 15 mile radius and they have virtually no crops. A nine-acre field of Hispi cabbage was wiped out by leatherjackets as well as crops of calabrese. Leatherjackets are little, leathery grubs 1/2" - 3/4" long which turn into 'daddy long legs'. Preferring a more continental climate a whole field of sweetcorn didn't germinate. Other crops have been under stress from the cold and wet with many bolting and the rest growing extremely slowly. I'd visited them to find out when we'd be getting our spinach, lettuces and lovely salad bags but they just gazed into the grey sky. It should be the busiest time of year, but there's no picking going on. They can't get the tractors on to the land because it's too wet and would compact the soil. They can't hoe because it's too wet and the weeds would just retransplant themselves. The local reservoirs are overflowing and the 65 permanent Riverford staff who should by now have been joined by another 60 seasonal ones are just waiting.

At Mike and Judith Smales' Lyburn Farm on the edge of the New Forest, the fields were very busy. A dozen Bulgarian university students were hoeing away the black nightshade and fat hen from between the rows. Were it not for them, Mike could not possibly farm organically as he would never find any labour in his stockbroker neighbourhood. The Bulgarians come here on May 1st on the Government' s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), whereby 10-20,000 work permits are issued. Mike arranges accommodation for them in the village and they stay until the pumpkins have been picked in October. I'd come to see how Mike had been getting on with our Heritage Seeds. We strode through his successful, tried and tested red 'Enorma' runner beans and 'White Emergo'. They were flowering prolifically and had climbed 6ft up the poles. Then at the edge of the field we arrived at our beans. There were rows and rows of perforated plastic where our plants should have been pushing up. We looked into the holes and they were empty except for bits of chickweed. Further down the rows you could see stubs where the odd one had emerged and been eaten by slugs. Maybe there would have been more safety in numbers. I was starting to feel quite embarrassed that I had wasted Mike's time, energy and land on these duff seeds. Then we arrived at a double row of beautiful, robust and unusual purple flowering plants. They weren't climbing like his other beans but they had definitely made it. I'll be intrigued to see what these sole survivors turn out to be like.

Mike has lost a lot of his sweetcorn to slugs. He has a terrible problem with them as does every organic farmer and gardener. Hedgehogs like slugs. It seems a shame that they are talking about exterminating the 5,000 of them that have been overbreeding and overeating birds eggs in Uist. Another unwise experiment introducing the wrong species into the wrong environment. They should be rounded up and brought over to our organic farms, as it seems that only they and ducks have an appetite for them. They are worried about overpopulating the mainland by doing that ( how ridiculous, as if 5,000 were significant dispersed across the UK ). The laws of unnatural selection, our cars and lorries manage to keep their numbers in check. A 'survival of the quickest' to cross the road. I'd very much like a couple for my garden.

The deer have been nibbling at the base of the runner beans. I asked him how he dealt with them and he said he shot them. I made myself believe that he was only joking, just as I had done smiling at Nicole Pascal's lovely tales about the wild boar coming down from the Pyrenees in the summer to roll in the watercress beds. She finished off the story by telling me that she shoots them. Mike's fields are very prettily edged with 3ft borders of purple phasilia. This attracts the hoverflies that prey on the black aphid that eat his broad beans. He has a magnificent crop of near perfect broad beans this year. In a month's time he'll plough the beans in and plant leeks, swede and turnips for the winter. There is a six-acre bed of rhubarb. He is disappointed with its performance as the sticks are spindly. Rhubarb is difficult to grow organically as it needs a lot of nitrogen. He digs manure into the beds ( manure contains nitrogen, phosphate, potash and various trace elements) but nitrogen is volatile and rises instead of descending to the roots where it is required.

I was in Lincolnshire a couple of weeks ago to visit John and Jane Edwards who farm 200 acres near Wrangle, Boston. They grow cauliflowers, our red and white cabbages and also potatoes. They too are busy hoeing between the rows of cabbages with a gang of five men. If you don't hoe, then the weeds outgrow the crop and take the nutrients away. The Edwards are virtually self-sufficient, only buying in seaweed. The seaweed is collected wild from the sea and processed down into a liquid form to spray onto the cereals, grasses and vegetable crops to assist the root structure in case of drought.

Nothing is wasted here. The slugs ate into last year's potato harvest and the 60 wasted tons were fed to the cattle, along with the outer leaves of the cauliflowers and cabbages. The cattle produce manure which is then built into a great compost heap the size of a house, this heats up to such a temperature that weeds and bacteria are destroyed before it is fed back into the land. It is a continuous circle.

The Edwards have joined the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, open to both conventional and organic farmers, to which they have allocated a large part of their farm. On 27 acres they have created 'scrapes and digs', hollows in the ground to hold water for chicks and other wildlife. Under the scheme they are only allowed one animal per hectare instead of the three that John would normally graze. It is stipulated which grasses to grow to aid the bird population and they must also create' Field Margins' - 3m barriers around their boundary fields. The grasses on these margins must be short as this provides a better hunting ground for barn owls looking for mice and voles. They employ an expert hedge layer to create new hedges with bushy bottoms to hold insects and wildlife. Last year they planted nearly 4,000 hedge plants, creating two new hedges. The scheme stipulates how much hedge you have to lay each year. All costs taken into consideration, the subsidy only covers about two thirds, but they are doing it anyway.

The Edwards are such a happy family. Unlike most farmers I speak to these days, their two sons will continue to farm the farm when they are gone. Every summer for the last 20 or 30 years they have taken their annual week's holiday with Jane's sister and her husband in Chapel St Leonard, 22 miles away. They set off with their caravan the last week of July to a site by the sea. Each day at 6am 'the men' return to the farm to work while Jane and her sister potter around reading gardening magazines and preparing the evening meal for when they return at around 8pm. Jane's sister turned up while I was there to discuss provisions for the Tea Tent at Wrangle Show for which they do all the baking. They were off to Boston to do the shopping for it.

I must mention Romeo Sarra in Pembrokeshire. This is the first season that we will be working with him and he has planted lettuces and calabrese for us to start in the middle of August. He also grows potatoes, cabbages, carrots, parsnips and cauliflowers. Romeo isn't a very Welsh name and I was wondering what sort of parents would do that to their child until I realised his origins. Romeo's father, aged 18yrs, was sent from mainland Italy to fight in Sicily towards the end of World War II. He was captured there and sent to various POW camps around England and eventually Dale. These prisoners of war were sent out in gangs to work on local farms. Here, he became very friendly with one of the farmers who asked him to stay on after the war. He went back to Italy to collect his things and returned to work on the farm for the next 13 years. In 1951 he returned to Italy to marry and brought his new wife back to Wales. Then in 1956 with his friend, another Italian ex POW, he purchased a remote, abandoned farm with poor land in Llandisillio. They started a dairy herd and growing cereals. It was very tough reclaiming the land from the bracken and scrub. That farm was sold in 1964 and the one in Broadhaven was bought. Romeo and his father, now deceased, have been adding land to it ever since. Living very modestly in a prefabricated house, which I think he must have built himself, he is surrounded by the hundreds of acres of glorious fertile land, the fruits of decades of labour both by his father and now himself. Being just 2 miles from the sea and the Gulf Stream currents, the climate is mild in the winter and cool in the summer. Romeo produces some of the earliest new potatoes.

Having a lot of land he has a large production thus no option but to sell to the multiples, but this leads him to despair. Last year he devoted lOO acres to grow potatoes for one of them - he produced 240 tons of Premier. After taking 80 tons, they decided they didn't want any more. When I visited him earlier in the year his barns were full of the sad, soft, sprouting potatoes that the supermarket didn't take. There was no other market for them. He didn't even cover the costs of growing them. He has virtually no staff and does nearly all the work himself to keep his costs down. We had taken several tons from him but we can't possibly use the volumes that he produces. One of his neighbours grew 40,000 savoy cabbages for a supermarket. They took 5,000 and the rest were ploughed in.

At every farm I visit I hear the same stories. Caron Meredith farms in Llandsysul. She too had grown potatoes for one of the supermarket packers. Of her 80 tons they took 10 and the rest were dumped in the corner of a field for the cattle. This was their first year of becoming fully organic after the painful three year conversion period. They lost money. When I asked how that made her feel, she said "..mad. . . .angry. . . .physical pain of all that labour in all weathers. . .exhausted. . . disillusioned. . .ground down... too much.... it's thrown back in your face ". She told me how a supermarket packer will take a ten potato sample from the top of a ton box, and on that basis of that sample, reject a whole crop. Her neighbour had grown 15 tons of carrots for one of the packers. The crowns were too big, they weren't straight enough and there was too much soil in the box so the whole crop was rejected. That same week there were carrots from Israel on that supermarket's shelves. A year's gruelling work, seven days a week and 16 hours a day, then nothing to live on for the next 12 months. It is utterly soul destroying. It is persecution.

Farmers can't understand why we never read or hear anything about it in the media and nor can I. They have to suffer this with virtually no exposure and no-one seeming to care. They will all eventually go out of business and we will have no home production. Why is the finger of blame never pointed at the people who are, beyond doubt, the ones responsible for destroying British farming. There's an eerie silence about it all and as long as it remains like that, nothing will change. One of the farmers who was going to grow for us, now isn't. He is on Prozac recovering from a nervous breakdown.

At Cheryl Martin's farm in Kent, the Snow White Cherry tomatoes and the little Yellow Berry tomatoes from the Heritage Seeds are doing well, I'm very relieved to hear this since they'd put up brand new poly tunnels especially to house them. We are looking forward to a good yield.

Andrew Ward near Ash in Kent sowed the seeds of our Heritage beans in his tunnels in a peat bed to give them time to develop before transplanting them into the open fields. This was again done because of the massive slug explosion. We really need those hedgehogs back.

The Stafford and Perovka broad beans have been a "big success". There will be some for the bags in the next week or so, though many will be used to keep seed for a full crop next year. The Bok runner bean failed to germinate at all, unlike the Fry which is flowering. The French Horticulture and Brightstone dwarf french beans germinated well but the Snake failed miserably. And the two climbing french beans are again at an early stage of flowering, the Bi-coloured Coco Bean and the one whose name blew away.

For those of you who may have missed the newsletter that explained about the Heritage Seed Project. In exchange for sponsorship, the Heritage Seed Library donated to us some of the seeds of unusual varieties that are not on the EU list and therefore whose seeds cannot be sold. They are varieties not grown commercially and were it not for this seed saving, their genetic heritage would be lost forever. The seeds must be renewed every couple of years. In order to do this, the produce must be grown and the seed saved. We are having some ten varieties of tomatoes and ten varieties of beans grown by various farmers. Some of the produce will go into the bags and the rest will have their seed saved for next year - and so it will go on. Please click here to read the aforementioned newsletter.

In a couple of weeks we will have the Kestrel potatoes that Andrew has grown for us. They are similar to King Edwards but with deep purple eyes. He had blight in his Cosmos potatoes, supposedly a blight-resistant variety. It strikes when there is a certain level of humidity at a certain temperature. This is called a 'Smith Period'. The Potato Marketing Board text messages and emails warnings to farmers when one if forecast. Conventional farmers then get spraying with whatever chemical combination they use, organic farmers rely on a minimal amount of copper and a lot of hope. He told me today that he has a bumper crop of his normal runner beans. The yellow and the round courgettes will be starting next week, followed by marrows ( don't worry - he's just planted 1 per customer and we'll give you a delicious recipe to stuff it) and then sweetcorn in a month's time.

For the last six months we have had a new produce coordinator called Stephane - a Frenchman from Amiens. He is working very hard to try and find you the best and tastiest produce and to manage the quality control and careful packing of the goods. He desperately wants you to be satisfied. If any of you have any comments about quality or contents of the bags he would love to hear from you. His email address is stephane@farmaround.co.uk. Any feedback is always invaluable to us as we strive to get it right for you.

We are delighted that our organic grocery catalogue is completed, nearly nine months later than expected. We underestimated the work and time involved in sourcing all the products and all the ramifications to our computer system, website etc. We will be sending out the catalogue during the first week of September and hope you will like the selection. It has been designed to be flexible. You will be able to add as many, or as few, as you like of the 600 plus new products to your regular order. Alternatively you will be able to use it to do one-off shops. As a regular farmaround customer there will be no minimum order and no extra delivery cost.

I hope that you enjoy the holidays whatever you do and wherever you go. Contrary to the introduction of this letter, as I write this, it is a perfect summer's day.

Many thanks as always for all your support,



Isobel Davies