Urban Farm

We haven’t updated our farm blog in a little while (we’re ever so sorry). Its just as it had been raining non-stop for what seems like forever, much of our fruit and veg took a fair amount of a battering due to over-flooding, so we didn’t have too much to write about!

However, the sun has been shining his little face off recently, so we thought we’d get back into the swing of it. Plus we wanted to fill you in about a recent meeting of ours with a wonderful chap, Mark Diacono.

Many of you probably already know, but for those who don’t, Mark Diacono is the ex-head gardener of River Cottage. The brainchild of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.

Mark also runs ‘Otter Farm’ a 17 acre farm down in Devon. Otter Farm is the UK’s only climate change farm. It’s home to lots of lovely stuff – dwarf kiwis, orchards of olives, peaches, almonds, chocolate vine, Szechuan pepper, apricots and Japanese wineberries - to name just a few. Mark also has a forest garden, a vineyard and a perennial garden.  

We were lucky enough to be introduced to Mark through our friend Tim Sanders from Discover Dorset, have a little look here http://www.discoverdorset.co.uk/ at what Tim does (we’ve been on one of Tim’s Discover Dorset Tours and would highly recommend it!). After our introduction to Mark via Tim, we invited Mark to come and see what we’re all about! So he popped to see us for a day visit.

Mark seemed pretty excited about the Urban Farm, our little piece of land out in Sopley the New Forest, and the opportunities that it provides us with – we plant the seeds, they grow and flourish, we harvest the crop, bring it into our kitchen and plate it up for our customers. We get our customers enthused with our story and they go on to spread the word about the importance of ‘growing your own’.

After having a little look around Mark suggested we should extend our piece of land. We had a chat about a potential acre of vineyard to start growing our own grapes for wines –the staff got excited at the thought of this! We then got thinking about other things we could start to grow out there, such as planting an apple orchard to grow our own cider, plus growing some other more high value crops. We also chatted to Mark about some of the stuff people don’t usually eat, such as the flowers from broad beans - we’re not going mad, it actually adds another dimension to eat certain flowers as part of your food.

Alas, our time with Mark came to end, but we felt there is so much more that we’d love to be able to learn from him and discuss with him, so we’re planning to invite him back for a BBQ at some point. We’ll pick all the veg from the Urban Farm and enlist his help to cook it on the barbie.

If you want to find out more about Mark, you can have a little look at his website: www.otterfarm.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter ‘@markdoc’ He’s a great guy, so we’d recommend you check out what he’s up to. 

When we started the farm, we had planned to get lots of our veg ready for this Christmas and so far we’re pleased to say we’re on track. Our sprouts, fennel, squash, leeks and kale are all coming along nicely and we’ve recently planted some broad beans and garlic to ensure they’re ready for 2012.

Planning for year two has taken lots of time and effort, in fact we’re still planning! We have learnt lots from our first year and know that we started too late, so we’ve begun conversations with our farmer Stuart and our head chefs from Reef and Beach, Jacek and Carl. It’s important for the chefs to work with Stuart to tell him what has worked well on the menu, Stuart can then build this into his planting cycle.

We also need to get a bit better at working out our quantities. This year we had far too many potatoes available at the same time which meant some of them went to waste. Next year we’re going to stagger the planting and hopefully the arrival of the potatoes!

In terms of the actual preparation for 2012, we’ve dug up all the potatoes, lettuce and beans. We’ve also started to rotivate the land, working in the manure we get from the pigs on the neighbouring plot.  We’re pretty lucky to be situated right next to a pig farm as it means we’ve got access to a fair amount of pig poo! This combined with their bedding and straw and compost from our own veg works a treat.

The size of our plot is also something we need to consider for the future. We’re hoping to have a meeting with Dan Tanner, the owner of the land, to see if we might be able to increase our plot size. So much of what we’ve grown this year has expanded, for example our strawberry plants have gone from 60 to about 250 as they’ve sprouted sub shoots. This has also happened with our rhubarb plants, we’ve gone from about 40 plants to 80 in a matter of months!

There you have it, we’re keeping our fingers and toes tightly crossed that we can expand and have up to one acre next year ;) 

We were aware pretty early on that getting water to our plot would be one of our biggest challenges, and it really has caused us so many problems! As we had a very dry spring at the start of the year, our plot was bone dry when we first inherited it so we had to think of a way to get water into the soil and quickly.

We have a ‘pond’ at the end of the plot which refills via a little stream, so this seemed like the obvious way to obtain our water, but we then had to think of a way to capture it. In the early days our farmer Stuart used five buckets and a watering can, which combined could carry about 80 litres each trip. He would head down to the pond, fill them up by hand, pop them on his trolley and tow them around the plot. This was done on a rota basis, most plants /crops in need up to 10 times per day!  Stuart lost some weight! It also had to be done either first thing in the morning or last thing at night, to ensure the leaves didn’t burn and the water didn’t evaporate.

We’ve now moved on to use a giant(ish) water tower – the very water tower used in our fish and chip challenge that we mentioned in our last blog ;) – but it still only holds about 1,000 litres, so if we have a dry spell we could use this water up in just 24 hours.

We’re currently looking at trying to find a way to pump water from the pond into the water tower. We then plan to connect the tower to a water system, perhaps some irrigation piping, which would go from the tower to the key plants such as the strawberries, lettuce and tomatoes. We’ve thought about using some form of solar power, or perhaps a little generator to get the water from the pond to pump it into the tower – a quirky and interesting way to get round drought. We’d love your suggestions if you have some?

So as you can see getting water to our plants has been an interesting process, but ultimately we think our problem has been great for the environment, as it has made us think of green ways to water. Our water goes straight to the roots of the plants via little plastic bottles and tubing without any wastage, so it’s both sustainable and environmentally friendly. 

If you’ve read this title thinking that you’d like to try our new tea, then hold your thoughts right there as comfrey tea is in fact a liquid fertiliser :-)

The comfrey plant is really rather good at sucking nutrients out of the ground and storing them in its leaves. The leaves can then be used and brewed to make a nutrient rich liquid to help other plants to grow into lovely healthy specimens. We harvest the leaves from our comfrey plants about four times a year.

So how do we make comfrey tea? Well, we’ve installed a giant water container at the farm which holds 1,000 litres of water - we’ve recycled this tank as we had it made to cook a giant portion of fish and chips recently, don’t ask ;) – our farmer Stuart then takes two big hessian sacks, the kind that onions and potatoes come in, fills them full of leaves from the comfrey plants, ties them up at the top and pops them into the water container. We leave the sacks to brew for two to three weeks, a bit like brewing massive teabags, then hey presto your liquid fertiliser is ready!

Comfrey liquid fertiliser acts as a great intensive feed for certain plants, plants that need a lot of water such as strawberries, tomatoes, green beans and broad beans, as it gets to the roots very quickly. To speed the process up even further, we use plastic bottles with a pipe connected to them. The bottle sits above the ground and the tube underneath takes the water straight down to the roots.

Using comfrey tea works perfectly for us as we try to use as little chemical and commercial fertilisers as possible to fit with our brand values and our ethos. As our Urban farm is only situated on a small plot it’s quite manageable too.

If brewing your own comfrey tea seems like a lot of hard work, then don’t worry, you can just take the leaves, dig them into your compost and they’ll act an accelerator. Either way, it’s good stuff!  

Overall, I’d say we’ve been really, really lucky with all our fruit and veg this year, so here is the lowdown on how its all gone at the Urban farm: 

Rhubarb - We’ve been totally amazed with our rhubarb crop. In its first season rhubarb plants normally give two or three stalks, but some of our plants have given around 15! It has grown much quicker and more ferociously than we ever expected. We’ve been able to make some tasty crumbles, compotes and we’ve even made rhubarb syrup for our bartenders to use in their cocktails.

Strawberries – Unfortunately, we didn’t really get any from our crop this year, but we’re aware it can take a few years for strawberry plants to bed in. We started off with 60 plants, which then grew offshoots of their own. We began by cutting these offshoots and putting them in water to try and get them to root, but we found that it was actually easier to put the offshoots into plant pots directly in the field. By doing this, we’ve managed to get around 200 strawberry plants from the original 60 - not bad eh!

Asparagus – Our asparagus crop has grown really well. We knew when we started growing it that you can’t yield any crop in the first year, but we’re right on track for year two. We’ve had a couple of issues with pests, namely rabbits who have been digging the asparagus up and nibbling away at the tips! So our farmer Stuart has bought a catapult and has taken to sending out the occasional warning shot to some of the local wildlife while he takes a break – they’ve not gone on the menu yet ;)

Beans – green and broad varieties – Green beans are officially nuts! They grow so quickly. Both the Urban Beach and Urban Reef kitchens have been inundated with them for the past four weeks. We’ve been lucky with our broad beans too, they’re so tender. You can pop them out of their little cases, toss them in butter for 30 / 40 seconds and the job is done. They don’t even need cooking. It’s so exciting to see the difference in quality between this home grown produce compared to what you buy in the shops.

Beetroot – As well as growing traditional red beetroot, we’ve also had a go at growing some of the white stuff. We’ve never had white beetroot on the menu before so it has been a learning curve, but its worked well in some of our salads.

Artichokes – We haven’t really known what to do with these. In our first year we’ve only had one per plant, but we’re told you can yield three or four from each plant in the second year (here’s hoping!).

Other stuff – Our tomatoes are starting to ripen and we suspect they’ll be out in abundance over the next few weeks. We’ve also been lucky to have some lovely herbs, particularly our basil which we’ve used to make pesto. Our salad is ongoing as it can be turned around every six weeks or so and of course we’ve had plenty of Urban potatoes.

We’re looking forward to welcoming the lovely season that is autumn and with it the arrival of some of our root veg. Fingers crossed for parsnips and brussel sprouts galore!

Pretty much everything with the Urban farm has been a learning curve and what to grow has been no different.

So to begin with we looked at what we currently sell at both Urban Beach and Urban Reef, what we sell the most of and what can be grown in the UK. Once we had a definite idea of the types of things we wanted to grow, we then completed research into varieties.

We took a historical approach to our research, by this I mean than we didn’t want to grow any ‘GM modified’ or ‘high yield’ crop, we wanted good old fashioned stuff, the things we really enjoyed as kids. My father-in-law and our Urban farmer, Stuart, remembered the taste of certain potatoes from his youth, ‘Red Duke’ and ‘Home Guard’ being particularly tasty tatties. Stuart then looked into whether these varieties still existed, which thankfully for us they do, so they made our list.

We also considered high cash crops. For example, asparagus is quite expensive to buy and it takes two years to grow, but as we use loads of it when it’s in season, it made sense to plant some up. Fast growing crops, things like salad leaves, rocket and rhubarb are used daily at Urban, so it made sense for us to grow them too.

With some of our crops, such as our tomatoes, we’ve planted four or five different types to see which is best for what dish - we’ve grown some for our salads and some for our sauces. It sounds like a lot of effort, but to us it’s these finer details that get us excited. It’s also exciting for us to be able to take our chefs out to our piece of land with a little cooker in tow, they can then dig up some veg and cook it there and then, you can’t get fresher than that!

How to grow it has also been an educational process. We’ve really had to learn how to use the land. For example, when we leased the land, I wasn’t sure if you grew potatoes one month whether you could use the same plot of land the month after to grow something else. The answer is no, so rotation was key.

What crops to put next to one another is also tricky, because certain crops will benefit from one another but others might not. So we learnt to grow garlic in between our strawberries as it helps to keep the bugs down.

So there you have it. We now have a fairly detailed planting plan which Stuart works from and our produce has been grown in the best way possible – without artificial fertilisers and feed, the land has done all the hard work (with a little bit of help from Stuart of course!) 

After we’d acquired our piece of Urban land, our first challenge was to get it ready for growing and in an ideal world you need lots of time for preparation. However, in our case we were able to start planting in the spring of 2011 and as the winter of 2010 had been rather wet and dismal, the soil was far too soggy to do anything with it! Nonetheless, we were just pleased to have a plot and eager to get going, so we made the most of what we had.

For those that do have a choice, it’s always best to start preparing your land in the autumn of the year before you’re looking for a harvest. This will give you ample opportunity to get the ground ready over the winter months. Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

As soon as we could get our hands on the soil, we had to think about getting someone to look after it on a full time basis. While getting the Urban crew down to the farm to learn about the growing process was key for me, I knew I’d also need someone to look after it from day to day and I’m fortunate enough to have a very devoted father-in-law, Stuart, who jumped at the chance to get stuck in.

We then had to think about getting nutrients into the soil. Our produce can never be called fully ‘organic’ as we don’t have the soil certifications to say so, but it was important to us to use manure rather than fertilisers and to keep the process as natural as possible. We decided to speak with Dan Tanner, the lovely farmer we mentioned in our previous blog that we’ve leased our piece of land from. Dan was kind enough to allow us access to some of his manure, AKA plenty of pig poo! Stuart then set about working the manure into the ground with what’s called a rotivator  (pictured below). Not an easy process! Most farmers do the job with a big tractor in half the time, but Stuart worked with what we had, and like a real trooper got the job done.

So there you have it, we’ve been lucky enough to grow some produce this year (we’ll tell you all about it in our next blog) but next year our ground will be in an even better position to harvest more crop.

Next time:  Mark will give you an insight into what the Urban team have been growing at the Urban farm and how they’ve been growing it.   

Location was really important to me, because as much as I’d be happy to travel miles to get to the perfect piece of Urban land, I couldn’t expect my team to do the same. They are integral to this whole project and I knew they wouldn’t go out there if they had to do a 40 mile round trip! Couldn’t blame them either.

We are lucky enough to have found somewhere that’s only six miles away from the restaurant and it only takes about 15 / 20 minutes to get there by car.

Of course we had to do a fair bit of research to find this perfect piece of land, so I got in the car with a couple of members of the team, drove out to the New Forest and went to visit probably every local farmer and grower in the area, introducing ourselves to start building up relationships. As part of this process we met a lovely guy called Dan Tanner.

Dan owns about 1,000 acres in the New Forest - so just a little bit of land then ;) - and he grows a lot of the ‘pick your own’ fruit and veg and plenty of wheat too. We ended up employing his niece, Kay, who currently works as our in-house baker at Urban Reef and we then managed to convince Dan to lease just over half an acre of his land to us for the first year. This of course is part of a much larger plot, which hopefully over time we might be able to expand in to - if we can secure a bigger plot, we might be able to turn it into a bit of a small holding and have some chickens, pigs and lambs.

It’s also great that we’re close to a fair few farmers just incase we need any expert advice ;) and I have to say it’s rather handy to go and pick up some of the local produce (Dan has some scrumptious strawberries, asparagus and sweet corn!) while at the same time nipping to get some of our own stuff.

Next time: Next week Mark will tell you all about all the ‘behind the scenes’ work and how the Urban team got the land prepped and ready for planting.  

The idea came to me about 18 months or so ago now as where I source my produce from has always been very important to me (I like to source it locally where possible),  but I started to find there were some things I just couldn’t get hold of.

Now, I recognised that some of this was due to seasonality, even the best growers with the best will in the world can’t magic up the climate needed to grow certain types of fruit and veg, but I was going out to suppliers in the New Forest and finding that they were only supplying to larger organisations, chain restaurants and wholesalers. Us smaller independent ventures were missing out.

So I suppose my first reason for creating the Urban farm was supply and demand, I thought it would be such a fantastic opportunity to grow some really good local produce. More importantly than this though, was the desire to educate people, both staff and customers.

I can’t think of anything better than a customer sitting down at their table, speaking to their server and asking what they would recommend from the specials board and the server then coming back with some fantastic knowledge, such as: ‘the asparagus served with the specials tonight is only in season for 10 weeks of the year in the UK... they have a totally different texture and flavour to anything that you’d get imported from Peru... they are now at their prime as there are only two weeks left of the season... we picked them this morning...’ – I would be totally stunned as a customer to get this kind of response.

Of course this can’t be forced into the team. I realised the only way I’d be able to get this kind of enthusiasm would be to get them out to Sopley to start digging the land, planting and seeing it all for themselves.

I have been asked if I wanted to do this to save some money, but I can tell you that’s not the reason. In fact, it’s quite the opposite because it’s proving to be quite expensive. It has cost about £2,000 to buy a little walk-a-long tractor, about £1,000 to hire the field, I’ve also had to hire someone to run the plot and then there’s the cost of the seeds and the kit. I’ve estimated that year one will probably cost Urban about £10,000 and I’m pretty sure we won’t end up with £10,000 worth of stock. Ultimately, if the project can break-even within a couple of years, that would be good enough for me.

We shouldn’t ignore the fact there is a PR and marketing angle here. If we can show our customers that we love ‘growing our own’ and know how it has gone from seed to plate, hopefully they will get excited.

So there you have it, I created the Urban farm partly to get some good produce, partly to educate the Urban customers and the Urban team and also to have some fun! It’s still very early days at the moment and there’s a still a long way to go, but it’s a good start.

Next time: Find out a little more about the land. Where it is, how big and why Mark chose a plot in the New Forest.