Super Size Us

Autumn harvest veg at our "Meet The Grower" Harvest Party for veg bag customers

It's hard to describe how disconcerting it is when the beautiful but inanimate piece of decorative art that you were admiring, twitches. Your brain immediately tries to reconcile two contradictory facts – 1) objets d'art do not move of their own accord, 2) this one just did. While the brain is thus occupied, the backbone is released from its normal control and decides to send shivers up and down itself. Similarly the jaw, ordinarily kept lightly closed in accordance with social norms, is let loose to hang open leaving its owner at risk of being accused of looking gormless.

These are living things

A group of us stood in Sharon's kitchen, slack-jawed and shivering in astonishment, at the two large and intricate butterfly-shaped objects pinned to the curtain, each one 30cm or more from wingtip to wingtip. We were beginning to realise that they were alive. Sharon explained that they were Atlas moths and that they had been born a few feet away and lived their whole lives so far in her kitchen. Her son keeps giant stick insects in a tank on a nearby shelf.  Two beavers live in an enclosure outside. It was that kind of place.

We were there to discuss not giant insects however, but potatoes. As all of us are small-scale vegetable growers, of an organic persuasion, we know something about the relative value-to-effort ratio of different crops. For instance, salads are relatively low maintenance yet command a reasonable price whereas carrots are fiddly to sow, require stone-free soil, need 'thinning out' (pulling out the smaller ones to leave room for the best to grow) and cleaning once harvested, but are worth very little.  Potatoes similarly take a fair amount of space and effort but are two a penny when it comes to selling them. Growing them only becomes commercially viable when you scale up.

Taking the asparagus fronds down

So the idea under discussion was whether we could grow potatoes and carrots on a large scale, collectively, using one of Sharon's fields and her tractor. We could all contribute time to it and allocate any profits proportionally. Large tasks such as installing rabbit-proof fencing or muck-spreading could be managed easier with a group of us doing it. The produce could be sold to the existing veg bag scheme and local restaurants and cafes. We would all be learning about growing food in a different way from what we are used to. The tractor could be made to run on bio-diesel made from recycled vegetable oil from chip shops. Being able to supply carbohydrates locally would feel good, and if the end of the world comes it's nice to know you have a few potatoes of your own to eat.

Beginning to seed save... squash and cucumber seeds ready made for next year!

One or two logistical challenges were raised. An enormous amount of manure would need to be trucked in to bring fertility to the soil. Sharon's place is about the most inaccessible location in the entire Dovey Valley, being twenty minutes drive up a very narrow and winding lane from the main road. The cost of the fencing and hire of any necessary equipment would need to be covered by raising money somehow, either through official funding or crowd-funding. And most of us don't have a huge amount of time to devote to this next year so there's a risk that the bulk of the work could fall on just a couple of individuals.

My disappointing tomatoes - the bulk of them I've had to compost, they went mouldy

It was left with some of us taking actions to do more research and we'll discuss it again next month. If it could somehow be made to work, it would be fantastic to be part of. In the meantime it's back to our hoes and forks, weeding around the last of the season's vegetable crops on our raised beds with aching backs and weary arms. Somehow a tractor seems rather appealing.

My garden as of this week