The quiet Hampshire town that goes wild for watercress | Country Living UK

The relationship that we have with watercress is all about health. You know food really is medicine and the relationship with watercress was across all of the country you know so it wasn't about being a posh food it was a it was a daily staple and it was actually known as daily bread. So we've been harvesting and growing watercress here commercially as an industry since the probably the 1880s but prior to that watercress would have been grown in areas that would have been a lot smaller than the Oldsford setup is now but the fact is it would have been grown all over the country. I think back in probably 1920s there was about a thousand farms nationwide. So watercress is grown using water that's that's really important so the process starts when we first sow the beds. So we we have seed that we grow ourselves and produce ourselves because you just can't buy it. Once we've germinated the seed we do that in a kind of a jacuzzi which heats up the watercress seed it pumps oxygen through it and once it's just germinated we then transfer those seedlings to the beds. The process can take up to 12 weeks in the coldest months but during the summer the crop could grow in around about four weeks because it comes back it's like a regrowth. So what's quite unique about watercress is that the process of growing it's a monoculture it's it's growing in the same location time after time so we're getting five six crops a year but this has been going on for a sort of 140 years and so the crop has never really changed which is quite unique. The secret to all of that is we're not growing it in soil we grow it in water and the spring water that flows from the farm the top of the farm runs through and this farm in particular would have maybe six seven million liters a day and that change of water is like the soil changing constantly because it takes all its oxygen and it takes all its nutrition out of the water flowing through. We're lucky we've got a lot of watercress that goes home every day so it's super fresh we just have it a lot in sandwiches whether that's at breakfast or we put it on the plate and have it as just a very simple salad because it goes so well with many things you know at the end of a roast you can have a little bit of watercress and it mops up the gravy but I suppose the best dish we think is the pesto because you can freeze it so you make the pesto using fresh watercress very similar recipe to a basil pesto but then you can then put the pesto into ice cube containers and then you store it in the freezer so when you have pesto pasta or any dish you just pop them out and it thaws very quickly and it's great. Well the festival started 20 years ago it was a local businesswoman wanted to promote watercress and she started a very very small festival just at the top of Broad Street and we had four or five stalls and a tornado visited. I would say the public most enjoy the watercress eating championship and that's always a challenge and always good fun to watch they also enjoy the music and of course just the watercress. For me the favorite way to eat watercress would be watercress soup with fresh crusty bread. The watercress festival king and queen are chosen through the local primary school they run a little in-house competition and it's rewarded to the the children with good behavior or the best homework and they change the criteria every year.