I sat down with Sophie from Pitfield Veg who provides our kitchen with its assortment of incredibly fresh and vibrant vegetables to talk about everything from getting your hands dirty in the field to market garden economics to snacking on the job! She’s a one woman show operating a small farm plot in Hurstpierpoint.

 

 

Can you tell us how your vegetable growing journey germinated from the first inklings of an idea to your first real harvest?

So it all began with getting interested in how the modern food system works. I wanted to understand how we had become so reliant on the modern industrial food system and how we could take back some of that control and work back towards self sufficiency. So I started to looking for a place to grow vegetables and build my own little project, and the timing really aligned because at the time I was looking for land Pitfield Barn, near Hurstpierpoint, was looking for someone to take on a piece of their land for growing some vegetables to supply their cafe.

I applied, started growing, and very quickly found I was producing way more than their cafe needed. I had a proper panic attack when I had the first hundred lettuces and not a single customer other than the cafe! So I knew I had to find more outlets. Thankfully after some local networking I found there was a lot of interest in locally grown seasonal veg. Three years in and I have a weekly delivery route to restaurants around the city that means now all my veg gets to be enjoyed. I’m part of the bigger team at Pitfield but I handle all the veg, from sowing to growing to harvesting, and on half an acre I grow about 45 different varieties of vegetables.

 

Can you tell me about your first personal experience with growing vegetables before it became professional?

The first garden I was responsible for was in an overgrown allotment on Bear Road in Brighton and when I had the choice of what to grow I was just drawn to food far more than ornamental flowers. There’s this fascination about putting a seed in the ground and sometimes I doubt anything is going to come up and then it just does it! Something edible and delicious comes out of the ground fully formed and I’m always just like “wow”. Then I worked for a season at a farm near Lewes growing vegetables for London restaurants, which gave me insight into how to grow for restaurants. So when I took the land at Pitfield Barn and I thought I’d just be supplying them, and then the land started being so bountiful, I had the knowledge ready to quickly pivot to supplying restaurants. It’s all very unexpected; it’s really hard work and I know I won’t ever get rich doing it, but there’s no comparison between this life and an office job, and I know this is a real skill that matters in the real world.

 

That leads nicely into our next question. What is it like to be a vegetable farmer in today’s modern world, what is the same as it was in the past and what has changed?

Well the process of planting the seed at the right time of year, and the way you take care of it as it grows, and harvest it when it’s ready, hasn’t changed all that much, if at all. But one big change is the market culture. People nowadays are so used to going to the supermarket and having everything available at all times of year all because of massive scale industrial agriculture that uses chemicals and global shipping to create the same year-round food menu. But when you work with a local small scale grower you quickly adjust back to seasonal eating, certain produce only available at certain times of year. It’s different at first, but once you catch onto it you realise that local seasonal strawberries grown in healthy soil are very different compared to strawberries that have been grown in water with water soluble nutrients and flown in.

From flavour to environmental impact to your connection to and appreciation of the food itself, it’s all totally different. Industrialised food seems good for mass production, but the nutrition and flavour is dramatically lower. Of course it’s convenient to go to one place for all your food, we’re all guilty of it, but the price for that convenience is losing the precious market culture where you go to different stores, and talk to different people, a world where you stay connected to your community and you rely on the people you know rather than relying on a giant faceless company that cares more about your money than about you. In summary, the way we grow the veg has stayed the same but the culture around how people buy it and what they expect is very different.

 

What makes a local grown vegetable better than a supermarket grown vegetable?

Like I said before, they’re grown for flavour more than for productivity. We think in terms of quality over quantity, smaller harvests that are all delicious and healthy rather than massive yields of watered down produce. And local grown veg is much tougher and more resilient, they can cope with a change in the weather, they get through heatwaves and frost more easily. When you start growing in an overly sheltered environment with fertilisers and chemicals the thousands of generations of genetic intelligence in those seeds starts to be overridden with unnecessary human tampering; the plant knows what it’s doing far better than we do, and when we get in the way we make it less effective, less delicious, less nutritious, all for the sake of bigger numbers. For example, the mixed salad I grow will last in the fridge for a week and still be crunchy and tasty whereas salad from the supermarket will usually be wilted mush in a matter of days. The means of growing matter; it might look the same on the outside but it’s very different on the inside.

 

If you could only eat one vegetable for the rest of your life, what would you choose?

Potatoes. Potatoes 100%. They’re so versatile! You can do anything. Mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, hash browns. I could happily eat only potatoes forever.

 

What is one thing that would surprise people about the life of a vegetable farmer?

Well what everyone already knows is that it’s hard work, it’s long hours and physical labour and outside in the elements. But maybe people forget that we have direct access to the best quality food when it’s at its freshest. You can literally take it out of the ground and stuff it in your face. I mean, I have to try it first before I sell it on, right? It’s quality control as much as it is snacking on the job! To be honest it’s turned me into a bit of a fruit snob. I’ve tasted the good stuff and I can’t go back! All I’ll say is I can guarantee I’ve eaten more strawberries than anyone else, and it hasn’t cost me a penny.

 

What’s the weirdest, wonkiest vegetable you’ve ever seen?

I’ve seen some pretty crazy looking beetroots. Beetroots don’t really ever stop growing, and you can miss the moment to pick them, and if you just let them keep growing they can get two, three, four times bigger than a pumpkin, and the roots start to swell so they’ll be covered in these freaky alien-looking tentacles. You wouldn’t even know it was a vegetable.

 

Which vegetable is the biggest primadonna? Which one needs the most attention?

Tomatoes, for sure. They need to be started super early, and then they need to be re-potted, and re-potted again, and then they have side shoots that all need to be trimmed off, and then they need a support structure. They’re very demanding and time consuming. Mine have also basically insisted on only being grown in the polytunnel. I tried to grow them outside because I only have limited space in the tunnel, and during the hot dry weather the tomatoes were loving it and flourishing. And then we had two days of rain and they caught a fungus and every single one of them turned black and died within days. A painful mistake that I won’t be repeating again. They’re definitely hard to grow. But when you take that first bite and that delicious juice bursts in your mouth you magically forget about all that fuss.

 

Can you tell us about how soil quality affects nutrient density?

It’s essential to look after your soil. Whatever you put in your soil becomes the fertility of the soil, and if there’s no fertility nothing can grow. I compost, but I also love green manure. Green manure are crops that are grown to be dug straight back into the soil to improve its fertility and its structure. Plants like mustard or buckwheat, you grow them alongside your produce, and then just before they start to flower you mow them down and leave them on the surface, and then put a tarp over it and leave it for a few weeks and it all degrades into the soil filling it with nitrogen and all the other good stuff. It’s also a great way to save your back from wheel-barrowing back and forth from the compost pile.

 

Any secret greenfinger techniques and growing hacks you want to share with the world?

I got a great tip this year from someone running a market garden in New Zealand about cabbages. He didn’t have access to butterfly netting, as usual practice is to cover cabbages with netting to protect them from any insects. So instead he planted his cabbages really densely, and when they’re packed in together the butterflies tend to just eat the outer leaves and leave the middle alone. It’s a great example of how it’s good to just let nature do its thing, and as an intentional way of giving back to the ecosystem that gives us so much by letting nature have their share. I can live with some nibbled leaves, and I cut that part off anyway.

 

What’s a vegetable that deserves more love?

I’d say a turnip. Baby turnips are super crunchy and fresh and you don’t have to cook them, you can pop them straight in your mouth. I’d recommend slicing it thin and putting it in a salad, they’re sharp and spicy and they add a unique and zingy flavour that people aren’t really used to.

 

What would you like to see for Pitfield Veg at Babble in the future?

Honestly, just maintaining good communication with the chefs so I know what works well for them in the kitchen, and just focusing on fine tuning the ways I’m growing what I’m already growing so the produce just gets even tastier. I’ve spent a few years experimenting with different vegetables and I’m proud of everything I bring to restaurant kitchens, and now I’m confident with my baseline. Going forward it’s just a matter of listening to chefs and working their needs into my growing.