Introduction to Market Gardening

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. Factors such as whether you want to grow veg all year round, whether you want to use only hand tools or larger machinery will all come into play, and guide your decision making. 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 award winning growers 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 Pitney Farm Market Garden (near Langport). Rita and Adi run the market garden here and will give an insight into there approach to growing for a farm shop and onsite cafe, producing year round crops and having field scale production. 

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 Fresh and Green (Ottery St Mary), where Ruth has run a local box scheme on much lighter soils than Trill and Pitney since 2006. Fresh and Green is a twelve acre farm, six of which produce seasonal veg, year round for the veg box scheme that she runs. There is 600 m 2 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.

For more details of the course teachers go to the main Introduction to Market Gardening page.

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