As the 2024 veg growing season draws to a close it’s a time of reflection and review, mutterings about the weather past, and plans for next year’s plantings.
Some of the Plot staff team (Dennis, the Plot’s grower, and Ellen, the project coordinator) and this year’s FarmStarters (Jill, Juliet, and Mara) came together to eat a meal together, celebrate the year, reflect on the learnings and share next steps.
The FarmStart programme began in March and every Friday until the end of November the group came together for training, lectures, farm visits, and discussion. March was wet, and our site certainly holds water. Jill was reminded of those first weeks and her early memories included ‘putting my hands in the soil to plant broad beans and pull out nettle roots, and it was literally like soup’. These broad beans actually did really well, despite the wet start!
A big theme of reflection was around the connections and space for respectful discussions.
‘I found it very interesting because we all first came together as strangers and we were working out everybody’s background, everybody’s life experiences, what they were coming with. I found that a really interesting and fascinating part of it, really…’ commented one FarmStarter.
The plants, like the people, grew in the space we shared.
Mara spoke of ‘such excitement around the germination and when you start to see things in the ground and growing… I remember particularly paying attention to my trays [I’d planted]. I tried to recognise my… handwriting on the labels’. When the harvest comes, there’s satisfaction in having seen that full process. There’s a photo of one of the FarmStarters cradling the first radish of the season!
Jill mentioned that we’ve ‘been actively participating and learning through the doing, I have loved that. I think that’s really, really effective… I haven’t written a single assignment and there’s a joy in that – a real joy not not having to learn in that academic way’.
After the focus on horticulture for the first few months, the summer saw the broadening of discussions to explore agroecology and the growing movement for this type of farming, across the globe and in the UK. Juliet said ‘that was fascinating. I mean, I already was very interested in ecology and nature, but I didn’t know the agricultural history. So I found it really interesting to find out more about the agricultural revolution and all that’s gone wrong in the last 50 years for agriculture. It opened my eyes to lots of things I didn’t know before.’
The farm visits were also a highlight, especially as with two local veg-growing enterprises ‘they all were sharing the same issues, but just in different ways and they were predominantly both of them protected cropping which is very different to at the Plot.’
The conversation inevitably slipped back into musing about the weather. In four seasons at the Plot, each has been so different. Ellen reflected on the first season which had seemed more stable, and then how each subsequent year had been so very different – one a hot May, another cold and wet etc – making planning very difficult. Dennis talked about his hopes for a two-wheeled tractor next year, to help make the site more productive.
In terms of selling the produce at the Plot, learning was noted around ‘getting my head around harvesting, what’s good enough in terms of produce, and how we quality control what to put in. That was really interesting’. Understanding the wider market was also interesting, especially a talk from Sean at Organic North, a wholesale coop based in Manchester, as he had ‘some really interesting ways of seeing resilience in terms of business’. Linked to this, a session around the Eight Forms of Capital model had been useful – ‘it does sound a bit like a hippie kind of thing, but actually, it’s super useful to compartmentalise things… and the fact that you recognise values from different angles, but know they are all necessary for the whole’.
This discussion ended with a call to action – there’s so much learning to do, but Dennis’s final piece of advice was ‘It is very useful to plan everything, but sometimes you just have to do it and then deal with what happens after. Because sometimes there’s no other option or you won’t find the perfect solution’.
With that the discussions moved on – future plans include possibilities to work with other local growing organisations, garden-sharing and lots of ideas for the Plot for next season.
A personal account, written by Ellen, on behalf of the 2024 FarmStarters.
