It’s a sunny Thursday when I arrive at the farm, early enough in the summer that the warm weather is still a novelty. The space smells of a heady fusion of hay from the bales I’m sat on, wildflowers from the table and smoke from the cooking pit, from which Peter is soon brandishing a platter of farm sausages, the perfect accompaniment to the giant pot of tea that Henri soon appears with.
I’ve been to a lot of vegetable farms over the past five years, most of them ranging from 0.5 - 5 acres in size. But when I heard about Plowright Organic and that they were growing on 30 acres of land, my ears pricked up and I figured it was time for a visit.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time on farms; I’ve got used to the way things work, the way they operate. But occasionally, I stumble across somewhere different, somewhere a bit special. Model Farm falls firmly into that category. They tick a lot of the boxes with their organic and pasture reared certifications, but I was itching to visit and see the farm for myself.
Step two in my locavore Christmas adventure was to source the vegetables to go with my duck. I get a weekly vegetable half share from my local CSA, the wonderful Sims Hill. But I realised this wasn’t going to be enough to feed myself and my parents, and leave me with vegetables for the rest of the holiday period, and so decided to supplement this with a seasonal box from another local producer, the Community Farm.
Bread is something I eat almost every day, but for years I bought the fairly typical branded loaves stocked in most supermarkets, used to the eternal softness and addictive sweetness that comes with these loaves. It was the writer Michael Pollen who opened my eyes to a deeper understanding of bread and the wonder of sourdough with his book ‘Cooked’. A few years later I found myself living in rural Canada, in possession of my own sourdough culture and churning out four loaves a week of pretty decent bread for the people I lived with. Fortunately, Bristol has recently seen a growth in artisanal bakeries, and the East Bristol Bakery was my first port of call.
