Our Growing Ethics & Ethos

We all depend on soil; it is our only mainstay medium for procuring naturally healthy food. A living soil is one teeming with microbial life. It cycles nutrients, filters water, and stores carbon. We use its richness to grow and harvest a crop from, but with minimum disturbance. Biodiversity is nature's immune system, a delicate balance that the human race have only just scraped the surface of truly understanding. But what we have come to understand is that for years we have been unknowingly terrorising our soils with modern farming methods and now coupled with the extreme unpredictability of climate chaos, pollution in the air and water and rapid biodiversity depletion the natural harmonies of soil and plant growth are under threat.

Careful monitoring and a supply of corrective management strategies is part of farming in these difficult times. We test our soils and our plant tissue every year to check for mineral imbalances and, should we detect bioavailability issues, we have a cache of exciting natural ferments bubbling away around the farm to be applied as nutrient feeds, soil conditioners, and occasionally pest control all within this closed loop system. Ensuring that our soils are balanced and topped up means that the plants we grow can take up all the minerals and trace elements they need, crucial for building their proteins, DNA, chlorophyll, and supporting all plant functions.

When a plant has sufficient water, nutrients, gases and light, these compounds help basic metabolic pathways to function. If a plant is able to draw on a soil that is bursting with diverse, balanced microbial life, a soil that is functioning at its optimum, the plant can develop the alkaloids, terpenes, and phenolics that are known as secondary metabolites – these give the plant aroma, flavour and health; mirroring that, tasty, fragrant plant food contains these higher order compounds that have a beneficial and healing effect on the human body such as antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents protecting against disease.

Ploughing disrupts the microbial life in the soils, so we use minimum intervention surface tillage for preparation of the vegetable beds; we also add in our homemade composts and biological stimulants to multiply and feed the soil biology that may have been disturbed in the process. Our constant mantra for soil management is “abundant organic matter, reduced compaction and teeming soil microbiology” which brings us on to the next pivotal point of dynamic ecosystems and resilient food growing – plant health.

If you look around you at untouched natural spaces you will quickly conclude that nature does not function in mono-cultures, but rather in poly-cultures. Many different species of plants all growing together. Every plant species hosts specific microbiology, so a diverse and balanced soil ecosystem needs diversity of plants, their specific functions and their multifarious roots in the ground.

A complete poly-culture above ground feeds a complete soil microbiome below ground, and with this we have come to understand the detriment of bare ground. So, how can we replicate this natural process in the vegetable beds to develop diversity above and below ground while growing food crops? We are working out a system where we use cover crops on our growing beds; these are non-cash plants grown to enhance biodiversity, rather than for harvest.

We plant a varied mix of cover crops for fallow areas to add organic matter, build fertility, and reduce nutrient leaching in wet weather. We also companion plant specific mixes of cover crops with the cash crop to enhance complex root structures below ground and increase in-bed pollination and insect life above ground. These cover crops create a natural cycle of constant nutrient building on the vegetable growing areas, and no bare soil!

The extensive use of cover crops is improving soil aggregation and soil biology populations which we believe is the path to increasing soil resilience and allowing the food crops to optimise their nutrient content. Vegetables grown in poly-cultures do not grow up to have a uniform look – we see much more individual expression in the shapes and sizes, and that is why we are now dedicating ourselves to selecting the best plants from this system for our own seed. These Oxton ‘flocks’ of genetically diverse plants become respected team players and advisors in our striving to grow a future of resilient and tasty vegetables. All of which brings us on to the final pivotal point of resilient food growing – the community element.