Transition Culture

Valuable Vegetables - Mandy Pullen (2003)

Valuable Vegetables - Mandy Pullen. Eco-Logic Books, Bristol. (2003)

Key to the application of sustainability on a wider scale is the establishment of local food production networks, finding ways of feeding people which don’t involve supermarkets and which build on local knowledge of what grows well in the soils and climate of the area. Small scale organic growers have been helped significantly by the establishment of Farmers Markets, currently popping up around the country in the most surprising places. Another model that has proved very effective for some is what has become known as ‘veggie box schemes’, where a grower undertakes to provide a box of fresh seasonal vegetables delivered to the customer on a weekly basis.

Many small scale organic growers now focus more on generating local markets for their produce, and valuing the local over the organic, indeed a good number now eschew organic certification and its related paperwork, and instead operate along organic lines but work towards supplying a local customer base. Although many are drawn to establishing and running vegetable box schemes, very little until now has appeared in print, the closest being the excellent “Rebirth of the Small Family Farm� by Bob and ? Gregson, which was self-published in the US.

This book is the first detailed practical manual for the setting up of a viable organic market garden in this climate. Mandy Pullen set up the organic vegetable box scheme at Ragman’s Lane Farm nearly 8 years ago, and succeeded in turning a field into a thriving and abundant vegetable garden. While being rooted in a permaculture philosophy, she also makes clear that she is not dogmatic, and her priority remains to use things that work first and foremost. ‘Valuable Vegetables’ takes the reader through the whole process of setting up an organic market garden, from field to garden, and is written in an engaging, straightforward and honest way.

She looks at soils, how to turn pasture into beds, composting and layout. She is clear about when you need to spend money and when you don’t, and what you will need in your toolshed before you get going. She looks at everything she grows and assesses them in terms of their profitability and summarises her experiences of growing them. In this, Mandy comes across very refreshingly as a ‘non-expert’. She makes clear that prior to beginning her garden she had little experience of growing, and she learnt on the job. This gives her advice a quality more akin to the person on the allotment next to yours leaning over the fence for a chat about her cabbages, than to a vegetable growing ‘expert’.

Her section on marketing and selling your produce is excellent. Mandy has set a scheme like this up from scratch, and she shares what works and what doesn’t, and makes it all sound perfectly do-able. In terms of making small organic production profitable, bypassing the wholesaler and going straight to the customer has to be the way forward. The grower retains the power and the customer establishes a relationship with the grower which enriches them both. Using Mandy’s book could enable anyone to establish the kind of local marketing network Mandy set up at Ragman’s. At the back of the book are excellent tables showing what to plant when, how often to make successive sowings and how much of the various things you need to sow in order to fill your boxes, all very useful.

Any faults to this otherwise wonderful book? I would have perhaps liked a small section of colour plates in the middle, showing the garden at Ragman’s in more detail. I would also have liked to hear a bit more about how the various businesses and operations at the farm support each other, and whether or not the farm’s permaculture philosophy of having numerous enterprises working from the same place, all being marketed under the same umbrella, is a help or a hindrance. It seems to me to be an important element of what makes Ragman’s such an interesting model. Perhaps we will just have to wait for the next book, this time on the farm as a whole!

This book will become an essential text for small to medium scale organic growers. It is that most precious of things, a passionate yet practical distillation of one person’s experience. It is also an extremely useful book for the home gardener, as Mandy’s tips for the growing of a wide range of plants have been developed by someone with little time to spend on each plant, thereby offering the gardener a wealth of ideas for a labour-saving and abundant garden. If we are to wrestle control over where our food comes from away from the corporate food industry, while at the same time generating rural livelihoods and adding some desperately needed diversity back into our barren and neglected countryside, then we need Mandy’s advice with great urgency. She offers us a vision of abundance and true food security in an age moving further and further away from both, and we ignore the model she offers us at our peril.