Tolly’s Ramble on… some good news and some not quite so good news

I have written previously about the “Hungry Gap”; not everybody will have heard or know what exactly this is, so look back through our e-newsletter for an explanation of this annual food event.
This time last year we were looking into our crops from the fields and from our storage and wondering how we were ever going to sell it all. 2019 had been a very productive growing season and crops were heavy. We had had two very good growing seasons which is an unusual occurrence as they generally only come along once every 3-4 years as a rule.
Good weather helped a lot, but also our soils have improved dramatically over the past few years and we are reaping very high yields now.
Customer demand had increased a little, but not enough to mop up the extra production. Then Covid and lockdown happened, and we were completely overwhelmed by a huge surge in demand from local people for our produce. So much so that we had to temporarily close Lin’s VegShed and our website, whilst we organised ourselves to deal with what was actually a rather lovely problem.
We had 5 tonnes of potatoes sitting in storage that we had been giving away to FareShare  to distribute locally to soup kitchens. We had also been donating onions, as we had far too many of those too.

Shortage of labour to grade and pack them made it look as if were we going to end up composting them, but with local people out of work suddenly, we had a labour source to help us with the work. The demand for potatoes rocketed as supermarkets shelves emptied of pasta and rice. People returned to basics and spuds were definitely back on the menu. We sold the lot in a few weeks and cleared all of our excess crops by the time we needed to get the land back into production for the coming season, even beetroot and swede of which we always plough some in back in, were sold. Empty fields, just perfect! Everybody fed and happy and we gained lots of happy local customers, many of whom are still with us.

The past season of 2020 has also been an exceptional growing season for us with again very heavy crops. And with an expected increased demand we planted more crops that we had done the year before. Some we were not able to increase due to difficulty in obtaining seed supplies and the fact that some crops take a year to come to maturity. Growing food is not like producing other goods – you can’t just turn up the production overnight. It takes time to adjust and cater for increased labour demands and in particular the raising of plants for cropping.

So, we produced more food in the past 12 months than we have done ever, some examples being spuds over 25 tonnes, squash over 8 tonnes, strawberries over 2 tonnes! (They take some picking, too.) Not done the final sums, but we have probably grown and sold well over 120 tonnes of food, mostly within a small radius of the farm.

And the good news is that the farm finds itself in a very healthy position, great crops, lovely fertile soil, an increase in staff, much support from local people, who really appreciate what we do. We now have the capacity to increase production as much as the land we have available will allow. For the first time in many years we have plans to invest in the future production and increase our vegetable production, feeling confident in what the future will bring.

The not so good news is that we are rapidly running out of our own produce, it nearly all sold. This is around 6 weeks earlier than we would normally expect to run low. We are short of staple crops – potatoes, onions, carrot, cabbage, these are the crops we sell the most of. We have crops to come on – leeks, sprouting broccoli, kalettes, parsnips, salads, lettuce, spinach, kale and some other bits and pieces. We were looking forward to 1,000 cauliflower for early March, however Nature has decided otherwise and the mild Winter before Xmas encouraged them to grow early and start to form curds. The recent heavy frost has damaged them and its very unlikely that they will now produce a crop.

So, from now on we are going to be substituting produce from other sources via Choice Organics in London. We try as far as possible to source produce grown in UK, however other growers are in the same position as u,s having sold most of their crops earlier than usual. Inevitably, it will probably mean an increase produce from EU countries and also – in some extra packaging, as we will not have any control over the way produce comes to us.

We will do as much as we can to source local produce, as we believe that this is the best way to encourage an increase in production of organic vegetables. The acreage of organic vegetables grown in the UK has been static for over a decade and really has to increase quite dramatically to keep up with a very significant increase in demand. We will be very much looking forward to the end of the Hungry Gap in June with our very special strawberries.