2017 was a great season for growing veg, with plenty of sun and warmth as well as rain when it was needed. I have been increasingly using a system of minimum cultivation and compost-mulched beds, and the soil and crops flourished in the fertile and less-disturbed soil.

For the last two seasons the market garden has taken on trainee growers for an 8-month period. Trainees work alongside me in the garden and get the opportunity to learn the skills and knowledge needed for small-scale commercial veg-growing. The 2017 traineeships have come to an end and I am now recruiting trainees for 2018.  If you're potentially interested, please have a read of the ad below:

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Trainee Grower Vacancies

Ragmans Lane Market Garden is seeking two trainee growers for the 2018 season. This is a fantastic opportunity for two motivated people to gain practical experience and knowledge of the practicalities of small-scale commercial veg-growing, nurturing crops from seed to harvest over a full growing season.

About the Market Garden

Ragmans Lane Market Garden is a thriving organic vegetable-growing business, now about to enter its fifth season. Originally set up as a partnership, Jon has run it as his own business (with help from seasonal trainees) for the last year. The garden is based at Ragmans Farm, a renowned teaching centre in an idyllic location by the river Wye in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean. The garden has been steadily developing into a viable business based on a growing area of just half an acre of outdoor veg beds and three polytunnels. This has been achieved partly through an emphasis on growing high-value crops, particularly salads, and through the use of harvesting methods and crop successions designed to make the most of the available space. A minimal cultivation approach has also been adopted, using compost and other mulches to enhance soil and crop health while reducing the weed burden and need for tillage. Produce from the market garden is sold to local shops, restaurants and directly to local residents through the innovative Dean Forest Food Hub website.


About the Traineeship

This informal but comprehensive traineeship will run from early March until the end of October (some flexibility with dates). The trainees will work closely with the grower on a daily basis, and receive thorough practical training in the various aspects of running a small-scale market garden, including crop planning, cultivation, plant propagation, harvesting, weed management, fertility building, produce packing and marketing. The wide range of crops grown means that the work is varied – trainees can expect to be performing several different types of task over the course of each working day. There will be occasional sit-down tutorials discussing particular topics, but most training will take place on the job. Each trainee will be provided with a simply-furnished private room in a comfortable shared house on the farm, as well as all (mostly vegetarian) food and an £80/week stipend. In return, trainees are asked to work from 8-4:30 Monday-Friday, with a 30-minute tea break and an hour for lunch. There are some earlier starts (and earlier finishes) on harvest days, as well as occasional weekend watering cover.

2016 trainee Esme Shea:
“My traineeship at Ragmans was an absolutely wonderful experience! During the eight month season I learnt so much from Jon and thoroughly enjoyed both living and working at the Market Garden. My time at Ragmans has left me with a real passion for horticulture and equipped me with skills that I will use for the rest of my life. Since finishing the traineeship I have pursued a variety of horticultural work, including using horticulture therapeutically to support disadvantaged children. For anyone interested in learning about organic growing and market gardening, I cannot recommend this traineeship enough - a truly inspiring and informative experience."

The traineeship is conceived as a stepping stone for people to build a livelihood in veg-growing or a related field, so candidates will be expected to have a serious interest in developing the skills needed to pursue this line of work. Despite being rurally based, the market garden’s small scale and low level of mechanisation mean that the traineeship could equally suit someone interested in developing urban or community growing projects. In addition to general enthusiasm, the following personal attributes are required:

• Some practical experience of veg-growing on a commercial scale (eg. WWOOFing).
• Commitment to and/or interest in organic/agroecological principles
• A decent level of fitness and a willingness to perform physical work in all weathers.
• Ability to follow complex instructions and work efficiently, with a high level of attention to detail.
• Ability to work well as part of a team (including some supervising of WWOOFers in the summer months)
• Full driving licence and willingness to make regular deliveries (no more than a few hours a week on average)
• Enthusiasm for shared living and willingness to be involved in preparing shared meals at least some of the time

It should be noted that Jon is very much still learning the art of growing, so the traineeship is as much an opportunity to learn alongside him as it is to learn from him. To apply for one of the roles, please send an email to ragmanslanemarketgarden@gmail.com explaining why you would like to undertake the traineeship here and why you think you would be right for the role, including details of any relevant experience that you have. The deadline for applications is the 8th of January 2018, and interviews will take place during the week starting the 15th of January.

Please share this ad with anyone who you think might be interested. For further info, please use the above e-mail address or call Jon on 07503217680.

I recently discovered, after receiving a random phone call asking for business advice, that if you google 'market garden' in the UK, our page on the Ragmans Farm website comes up second. Why would a small and fairly obscure local business be in such a lofty position? Two reasons that I can think of. Firstly, Ragmans Farm (who we rent our land from) has a strong reputation as a centre for land-based education, so it gets a lot of hits and presumably that gives our page on their site a boost. Secondly, there are simply not a lot of veg-growing businesses who describe themselves as 'market gardens'.

Why not? I think the main reason is that not many veg growers, even small-scale ones growing on a few acres, would describe their work as gardening. It is more like small-scale farming. Where do you draw the line? Depends on many things, but I would say whether you cultivate with tractors is not a bad indicator - if you do that, you're farming, if you don't, you're basically (market) gardening.


I have nothing against tractors. We don't use them to cultivate here, and never have, but this doesn't mean we didn't plan to. When I initially started the market garden with Nat, Danny and Ben, the plan was to start small and expand into a new field, with potential tractor cultivation, in year 2.

As always, things didn't go according to plan. The workload on the initial site in the first year was too much for us to consider expanding, and Danny and Nat moved on at the end of the second year followed by Ben at the end of the third. I now manage the garden myself, ably helped by assistant grower Charlie and trainee grower Kirstin. As the team has changed and we have discovered what we do well and what we do less well, it gradually became clearer that the obvious way to produce more from the market garden was (to steal a line from JM Fortier) to grow better, not bigger.


What does this mean in practice? Focus on leafy crops and others that yield well off a small area. Harvesting techniques that optimise the productivity of the plant rather than the productivity of the person harvesting (i.e. picking not cutting). Lots of compost mulching, stale seedbedding and minimal cultivation for better weed control. I realise I am not inventing the wheel here and much of this will be familiar to anyone who is a fan of Charles Dowding. But as our system gets gradually refined and our productivity gradually improves, it feels exciting to be part of something that is steadily becoming a more viable growing business despite having just 1/2 acre of land under cultivation.

I think the reason this is important is because big gardening is ultimately more accessible than small farming - for a start, you need less land and you don't need the funds to buy a tractor. The potential financial rewards may be smaller, but so are the costs and potential losses. Because of this, if we are going to get more people back working on the land, some of those will be at the market garden scale. And the more examples of successful market gardens there are out there, the more people might be inspired to take that leap themselves. 
 

Well the trees are growing slowly but irrepressibly greener but it's a grotty old afternoon and bloody cold too, plus we're reasonably on top of  garden jobs so it all felt like high time for writing the annual blog post! Hopefully I'm joking and I'll do em a bit more often this year, time will tell...

Much has changed in the market garden over the past year. Nat and Danny left the market garden last autumn, but Ben and myself are keeping the veg flag flying here with the able and enthusiastic help of our new trainee grower Esme, who joined us both in the garden and in our house a month ago. She'll be with us for the season till October, and so far the informal traineeship we're running seems like a great way to get the help we need and get new energy in the garden, while giving someone who wants to get into market gardening an introduction to how (or how not!) to help all these seeds we're sowing achieve their tasty destiny... We're also taking on WWOOFERs for the first time this summer, and still have some space for May, June and August - get in touch if you're interested!

Even with this help, we now have less hands on deck overall and me and Ben realised that we needed to get more efficient if we were going to stay on top of things. One of the things that we spent most time on last year was weeding... now a bit of weeding will always be necessary if you're not nuking your soil life with herbicides, but we're trying out different things this year to reduce the burden of it all:
- more overwinter mulching: black plastic, partially broken down woodchip, crop residues - all have reduced the amount of weeds we've had to deal with this spring, while also keeping the soil protected from winter rains.
- stale seedbeds (a great old-sounding phrase that makes me think of stilton): instead of preparing the seedbed just in time for sowing/planting out a crop, we've been getting it ready a few weeks in advance (I reckon three weeks is ideal), waiting for the weeds to start growing, then hoeing them off before sowing the crop. This means that a lot of the weed seeds in the top layer of soil have germinated and been killed, so are not then competing with the crop as it starts growing. This works even better if you encourage more seeds to germinate by warming up the soil with old clear plastic (eg from a polytunnel). Results so far: seems like some benefit, but definitely not a cure-all.
- and just plain old doing more things in modules... You can get things started earlier in the polytunnel, and they've already got a good little head start on the weeds by the time they go out... It depends on the crop as some things are more likely to go to seed quickly if you transplant them, but for lots of things it works great...

So far the plan seems to mostly be working, and we're on schedule with getting beds sown and planted out... A few crops have been hammered by pests or not germinated well, but hey there's always time to hoe it off and start again... How will it all work out? Hopefully the next post will tell!

Also we're getting a bit of media attention which is always kind of nice/kind of scary... The local BBC were down today interviewing Ben about how we work with the wonderful Dean Forest Food Hub, who are nominated in the Best Market category in the BBC's food and farming awards, which are I believe tonight. If you live around the Forest of Dean (or don't) and are not familiar with the Food Hub, check them out here: http://www.deanforestfoodhub.org.uk/
And a few months back we had someone come to take photos of us on behalf of the Soil Association.. see below...

Happy springing!
Jon

The day after I wrote my last entry, lots of our lettuce plants started wilting and dying. Closer inspection revealed that lettuce root aphids were noshing their way through the roots, cutting the supply of nutrients and water up to the leaves. We're coping ok because we've got a broad mix of leaves going into our salads, and we've been digging up infested plants on a daily basis to try to contain the spread. Nonetheless, its hit our salad production significantl funny to think what a finely balanced and fickle thing a field ecosystem is, and how easy it was for a sudden change caused by some very small beings to shake me out of a 'la la everything's lovely' way of thinking...

Well its only mid-August but already feels like its been an endless summer of sun interspersed with an occasional and often welcome downpour. From May, things started to get a bit manic (which is my excuse for not having written any blogs since about then) and have only calmed down over the last few weeks, with pretty much all crops in the ground and the focus of field work shifting to harvesting and keeping on top of weeds (through a mixture of mulching, hoeing and good old hand-weeding).

 As first seasons go, 2014 has so far been kind to us. Our crops, many of which were planted quite late, exploded upwards, downwards and outwards in the sun and have mostly escaped the ravages of pests and disease. The leaves, herbs and flowers that make up our summer salads have done well, making for a very attractive and delectable final product, and spring onions and beetroot have also done particularly well.

Some crops that have had a tougher time are our brassicas (cabbages, broccoli etc.) which have taken a bit of a hammering from marauding pheasants and caterpillars, and the potatoes and tomatoes, which both started showing signs of blight very early on. Fortunately, while this disease has affected yields of both crops, we were able to contain it by cutting back diseased foliage and by applying a homemade garlic spray on the tomato plants as a natural fungicide. At the time of writing, we are continuing to harvest plenty of healthy and tasty potatoes and tomatoes.

The new challenge over the last couple of months has been selling the stuff we've grown. Ben, Danny and Nat have all done sterling work building good working relationships with farm shops, village shops and pubs in the area, and we have now reached the point where we are doing substantial harvests twice a week. It has been interesting to find out which crops are popular with our various customers and which are less so. We have easily sold all the cucumbers we've been able to grow, and while they lasted our kohl rabi were selling at a rate to rival hot cakes. On the other hand, no one seems remotely interested in courgettes... For both the growing and selling of crops, it seems that the strength of market gardening lies in diversity - if some crops won't grow or sell well, at least some will!

For Herefordshire residents, we will also be selling through the Pomona FarmDrop near Hereford from the 19th of June. Similarly to the Food Hub, FarmDrop works as a convenient way for people to buy produce directly from small-scale local producers. Visit https://www.farmdrop.co.uk/ to find out more. Other farm shop, pub and restaurant outlets for our produce are also in the pipeline - watch this space!

Finally, we are excited to feature in an article on the Sustainable Food Trust website, highlighting the challenges and opportunities faced by new entrants to commercial food growing (ie. us). You can read the article at  http://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/our-future-farmers-ragmans-farm/

We arrived in February to be here for the start of the growing season. The weeds (well the annual ones at least) had been doing a good job of dying under black plastic since being covered in August, and there was plenty of soil now visible on the surface as the plants rotted away. However, the soil was still much too wet to work. This meant that instead of rushing to get broad beans and garlic planted, we had time to sort out some indoor propagation facilities.

The cottage that we are renting from Ragmans, which adjoins one of our fields, is in many ways an ideal growers’ home, and not just because of its proximity to our market garden. On the north side of the house is a large and permanently shaded utility room, which stays cool but above freezing throughout the year, and is therefore ideal for chitting potatoes and storing seeds and crops. Jutting out of the south side, with a lovely sunny aspect, is a large double-glazed conservatory, where we decided to put our heated bench.


Ben and I got to work building the bench out of plywood and reclaimed planks. It is basically a 4 metre-long drawer running along the whole front of the conservatory. Once we had built the wooden frame, we lined it with plastic sheeting to keep in water and sand, and then fitted in some old insulation panels to minimise the amount of heat escaping out of the bottom. We then filled the bench mostly with sand, before laying out a length of soil heating cable in a long wave shape about 8cm below the top. We then filled the rest of the drawer up with sand, fixing in place a thermostat with a rod thermometer buried in this top layer of sand. The thermostat cuts the power to the cable at the desired temperature, meaning the plants stay warm but aren’t at risk of overheating. The heated bench uses a lot less energy than a space heater and has allowed us to get all of our crops off to a good early start. The tomatoes in particularly have benefitted from it, with many of them having reached 30cm in height by the time we planted them out in our big polytunnel at the end of April. The peppers and chillies have been a bit less happy, and even the biggest of these still look like they have a way to go before planting out.

We are starting many of our plants off in compost in module trays rather than sowing them directly into the soil. As well as meaning that plants get to start their lives in nice warm conditions, it also gives them a chance to get established before going out into the world and facing competition from weeds. So we needed more space for module trays than was available on the heated bench. Danny built three large propagation benches in the smaller of our polytunnels. Once plants that are reasonably hardy have got established on the heated bench, we have moved them on to these benches, and then perhaps to some low palette ‘tables’ outside of the polytunnel, to toughen them up before planting, a process known as hardening off.

Meanwhile, winter hurtled into spring and the soil started to dry out, and we started tentatively peeling back the plastic over the areas we had planned to cultivate first. While most of the weeds in Mandy’s field had been killed, in Cristina’s field there was still a lot of couch grass in the ground. This is perhaps because Mandy’s has had vegetables grown on it for most of the last 20 years, presumably with a sustained effort to get rid of couch, whereas Cristina’s has only occasionally been cultivated. The flipside of this is that Cristina’s field seems to be better-draining than Mandy’s, which might have become slightly compacted after years of rotavating. It’s a bit of a case of swings and roundabouts, and it’s interesting seeing and trying to explain the subtle differences between the two.


After many fun hours of digging out couch grass and docks with forks, we were ready to cultivate, rotavating with an old two-wheel tractor, which came with the nickname Big Al but we have rechristened Temperament Al. He was a struggle to use at first, but over time we are finding that Al is a nice guy once you get to know him. We made our first outdoor sowings, of broad beans and mange tout, in mid-March. Getting seeds in the ground, and seeing them germinate successfully, was both a joy and a relief, and felt like another big step towards the whole garden and business becoming ‘real’. After these first sowings things accelerated, and we now also have potatoes, carrots, spinach, onions, shallots, calabrese, cauliflowers, chard, beetroot and many types of salad growing in the beds outside, with lots more vegetables, herbs and flowers to go out over the next few months. Then it’s just a case of keeping the plants healthy and the pests and diseases off and weeds down, not to mention actually selling it all. Should be a piece of cake!

February generally feels like a good time of year to arrive on a piece of land. It’s still cold, but the days are getting longer and you can feel that the worst of winter is behind you. But this February was quite a special one. Lots of water fell out of the sky. And then lots more water. A week after we arrived I turned on the radio to hear that it was officially the wettest winter in at least 250 years. Amazing to think that you have to go back 10 generations to get to a time when it rained so much.


The River Wye is usually about 200 metres from our cottage (which adjoins the land we are renting), but that week the distance was more like 150 metres. The river was a swelling grey blanket, rushing in the middle but barely creeping at the edges, lapping malevolently at the new shore halfway up the riverside meadow. George Monbiot has written persuasively about how the continued deforestation of upland Britain, subsidised by Common Agricultural Policy payments that encourage farmers to remove the trees on their land, has exacerbated flooding problems in the lowlands. This is because tree roots act as conduit allowing water to percolate through the soil, whereas on grassland a lot more of it will run off and rapidly find its way into lowland rivers. The result is that since the 1930s the increase in flooding in the Wye valley has been far greater than the increase in rainfall. It’s interesting how many of us, myself included, are concerned about deforestation elsewhere but often ignore its effects at home. Nonetheless, I feel that these findings suggest the power of the land if we work with rather than against it - even if some degree of climate change is inevitable, its impact on our well-being will depend in no small part on the health of our forests and soils.


Fortunately for us, while the floods led to various springs and streams popping up around Ragmans Lane Farm, our growing fields remained remarkably free from standing water. I think the good drainage is largely to do with the fields’ proximity to a spring-fed stream and to the rutted old track from which the farm takes its name. Now it’s up to us to remember the benefits of slow-moving water, and resist the temptation to clear these waterways...