Inspirational No Dig Market Garden Grows Food, Flowers, & Thriving Communities

Hi my name's Lawrence, I'm a director of Worthy Earth where we run Market Gardens. We're here at one at Dumberdown Farm where we grow flowers, vegetables, the market. So we started at a place called Marta Worthy where our first Vegbots customer was a man called Andrew Ferguson. He asked us to come and do a market garden on his land and now this is our third season here and these are the results. This site has been inspired by a man called Richard Perkins where the beds are 75 centimetres wide, the paths are 35 centimetres. It's no dig where of course we buy in compost and wood chip, lay down cardboard, we source it all locally from local tree surgeons and a local compost maker as well. So we chose to grow a lot of flowers this year as chefs have started to love edible flowers like these here, the cornflowers. We're also working with a charity up in London called Punchy Bunch which are aiming to reduce youth violence by getting kids to sell flowers outside of Ealing station. Another reason why we grow flowers because it's perfect for pollinators such as bees and other beneficial insects to help with pest control. So we run a very small Vegbots scheme but mainly we sell commercially to pubs, restaurants and cafes and we've also convinced every Oxford college to also be taking fresh produce as well. We teamed up with a charity called Good Food Oxfordshire who to be honest did a lot of the legwork for us but just convinced them by bringing lovely food to them. The uptake's been amazing and we're also getting more growers as well where we've got a WhatsApp group chat which we can just get produce out there to them. So I started a small gardening business with my friend, I was always interested in being outdoors but we started getting asked to do a lot of hard landscaping like paths and fences which was not what I wanted to do so I completely stopped that business and started Worthy Earth which was just focused on growing fresh produce and flowers and haven't looked back since so it's been four years now. There'd be no way that I would think that I was into this, I was heavily into my sports football and such like but yeah slowing down during Covid and seeing that my mum although it was only a small garden still had space, turning it all into raised beds and just yeah it was the it was the best thing that me and my brother ever did so and it's got us to where we are now. Just making a change in the local food system, everyone needs food, it feels rewarding. I'm lucky that I get to wake up every day doing something that I actually want to do. So inside the fence here it's about half an acre with 80 beds and then we've also got a large polytunnel as well. There's about two people at work here, someone full-time and then a part-timer and then I come in on bigger harvest to help. The aim is to continue building these gardens, getting more people access to local food, more people in this line of work as well and yeah we're going to continue building no-dig market gardens. First thing why I like Rainbow Chard is it's really easy to grow, it seems like it has next to no pests and it's really tasty too. You use it just like spinach, I love it just fried with a bit of garlic and butter and it's ever abundant, you can grow it all year round. This is an orange cosmos variety, it's actually edible and the bees love it so definitely give it a try. It's our first year growing dahlias as well and I mean they're just stunning, they're by far my favourite flower that I've ever grown. So Worthy Earth's aim is to build community through food so please always come to our gardens and yeah come check them out, check out the website, Blenheim Palace is also open to visitors so yeah you can come see in that one as well.