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.
Over the last couple of months, I've been busy researching and connecting with lots of local producers and farmers. From vegetables to grains, dairy to oil, I've built up a long list of produce available in the local region. As I visit each producer, I'll add them to my map to build up a network of the local region.
I grew up in a family where salad meant iceberg lettuce, and it wasn’t until I lived on a farm myself that I came to understand the real beauty of a big bowl of fresh, mixed salad leaves. I quickly discovered the variety of the different leaves, and the wonderful flavour present in something I’d always consider rather tasteless. When I heard about the Severn Project and tried their salad mix for the first time, I knew a visit was in order.
So what is The Locavore?
For the last two and a half years, I've been living and working on an organic farm in Canada, with most of the food I ate coming from the farm where I lived. Along with many other hands, I built beds, weeded and thinned the carrots, milked the cow and cared for the variety of animals on the farm. During this time I developed a deep connection with my food, and felt comfortable in knowing where it came from and how it was produced.
