Where and when?

Trill Farm Garden, Axminster
Fresh and Green, Ottery St Mary
Springtail Farm, Wootton Fitzpaine
8th, 9th and 10th May 2021

Course content

Join us for this exciting 3 day Introduction to Market Gardening course, with a chance to see three different approaches to vegetable growing and marketing from three different market gardens. 

How you choose to market garden may depend on soil types, area of land available, local markets and personal preferences such as whether you want to grow veg all year round, whether you want to use only hand tools or larger machinery and the like. This course will show how all of these variables must be taken into consideration and how they lead to different techniques in market gardening from crop planning to cultivation techniques.

The course will show that there is not one simple way of growing vegetables, but it can be approached using many different techniques depending on soil type, proximity to market, scale and personal preference.

DAY ONE will be based at Trill Farm Garden, a 2.5 acre market garden started by Ashley Wheeler and Kate Norman. Ashley will lead the day and focus on crop plans, soil fertility, propagation, tools, bed prep, weed control and much more. We will spend some time in the classroom looking at crop plans and rotation, but much of the day will be in the garden looking at how we implement our crop plans to grow vegetables for restaurants, cafes, shops and a box scheme. 

DAY TWO will be based at Fresh and Green near Ottery St Mary where Ruth Hancock will lead the day. She will look at everything they do to grow veg for a box scheme, from propagation to polytunnel growing and everything in between. 

DAY THREE will return to Trill Farm Garden to focus on polytunnel production and selling to both restaurants and through their box scheme. In the afternoon you will then go to nearby Springtail Farm, run by Lally Owen and Tomas Carolsfeld. They have run the market garden for two seasons and will give a farm tour to give an insight from new entrants into a newly established market garden business. 

If you need accommodation there are plenty of B&Bs locally to us and we can recommend Monkton Wyld Court for simple, but comfortable accommodation with good food (dinner is also available if needed). 

Course cost

£210 for three days including lunch on each day. Please contact ashley@trillfarm.co.uk if you wish to book on only one or two days.

There is a 10% discount available to Landworkers' Alliance members, please contact us with details of your membership to receive the discount code.

One bursary ticket (half price) will also be offered to those who cannot afford the full ticket price. To apply for this please email ashley@trillfarmgarden.co.uk with a little bit about yourself, what you would like to get from the course, and why you think you should be considered for the bursary.

Meet the course leaders

ASHLEY WHEELER

Ashley Wheeler has run Trill Farm Garden with his partner Kate for the last 10 years. Brought up on an organic smallholding, he learnt a huge amount from his parents who ran a box scheme in the 1990's. After his Horticulture degree at Reading University he and Kate came across the opportunity at Trill Farm to rent 2.5 acres to run their own market gardening business. They now sell salad and other vegetables and herbs to around 20 different restaurants, cafes and caterers almost all within 8 miles of the farm. In 2020 they also setup a veg bag scheme, now delivering around 70 bags of veg locally. 
They have run traineeships at Trill Farm for the past few years, and these along with the courses are an integral part of the market garden in terms of helping others to access some of the opportunities that Ashley and Kate have been able to access. 
Another important part of the market garden is the seed production which they have been doing for a few years now and alongside saving seed for their own use they also produce seed for small UK based seed companies such as the Real Seed Catalogue in Wales. 

RUTH HANCOCK

Ruth Hancock is the lead grower at, and founder of, Fresh and Green Vegetables, established in 2003 in East Devon.
The market gardening business is run from a twelve acre farm, six of which produce seasonal veg, year round for the veg box scheme that she runs. They have 600m2 of protected cropping, in the form of polytunnels.
Most of the propagation is done on site, direct sown, or in the dedicated greenhouse, and with the exception of ware potatoes all of the vegetables marketed through the veg box scheme are produced by the business.
Over fifty different types of vegetables and herbs are grown on a six year rotation, with egg laying chickens, and green manures incorporated into the rotation scheme.

LALLY OWEN & TOMAS CAROLSFELD

We are Tomas and Lally of Springtail Farm. We are new entrant growers who run a small low-till market garden on rented land at Fivepenny Farm in West Dorset. In total the market garden is about three quarters of an acre and 2021 will be our third growing season. We grow a wide range of vegetables and cut flowers selling them mostly at a weekly market, local shops and restaurants and in 2020 we set up a small box scheme in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. We don't do this alone though, and working with people is key to our health, our sanity, our business, why we do what we do, and what we feel is the long term viability of being growers. The market garden is in effect run by three full time employees, and our dream is to someday co-run a much bigger project, that provides training and employment to upwards of six people full time. We are driven by growing the most delicious and nutritious vegetables that we can, in bountiful quantities that pay mind to the land that we tend and the communities we feed.