A YouTube video by Richard Perkins (uploaded June 27, 2019) documenting a no-dig market garden training led by guest trainers Charles Dowding and Steph. The video mixes short clips of training, harvest and packing workflows, deliveries to local cafés, and a guest chef Elin who runs a food-waste recycling restaurant. Major themes are no-dig market gardening practices, observing beds to drive management decisions, coordinating harvest/packing teams, and sharing different trainer perspectives.
Chapters
So it feels like summer is really on. Great to have Charles Dowding and Steph here leading the last two days of our no dig market garden training. And I've been helping the gang with harvest and packing and delivery today. So nice to get my hands on the farm and not be leading the training. We've had a great first few days and a really nice group here in beautiful sunny weather. And so just a few clips of the last few days. So that's turning about €1200 of chicken into €2000 with a bit of salt, a little bit of time, maybe a couple of hours together. Looks absolutely beautiful.
Sailing teaching.
Day one, market garden course. Chef Elan is back, which is funny. Elan, you were here in our very first year and there are stories to tell and memories to recount. Elin basically single handedly chefed the whole first year for everything. She is a machine and she now runs. Do you want to plug your business?
My business and a food waste restaurant.
They have a restaurant recycling food out. The waste streams, turning into gourmet food in. Where is it? How do people find it?
It's in Stockholm in Sa de Halana.
And we can put a link to it if people want to check it out. Wow.
Yeah, that would be great.
Cool. And what did you make us, you wonderful lady?
This is just a salad with mixed greens from the garden, some mustard and some sugar snaps and. And then there's a cusco salad with roasted veg.
Is it out of the compost heap? This is.
Yeah, this is just out of the compost heap. Then there's some mint and lemon sauce and hot chicken just came out of the. The smoker.
Stays like this and then you get like 45 degrees. You going to play a joke on me and not do. So? Grazing tall, letting animals take what they want to take. You see they're zooming around, taking off mature, supposedly unpalatable seed heads. Energy. Near the tops of the plants, We've got lots of beautiful hakari radish. You can just make out herbs here. Lots of salad lettuces, masculine mix, snap peas. And so we're going to try and see how to coordinate people in a way that people can learn something from the process. Nicely done. Watching this. What's this?
Why put one flower on each cake piece? Cake? The one there, it's all gonna fall off. What is this?
This is.
What do you call it?
Pear.
Upside down pear and cardamom and buckwheat. It's great.
So. But then ongoing. There's a big myth out there. So Charles and Steph are here and they're leading two days on the no dig market garden training. We've got lots of pak choys, salads, hakarois, things going out again today. So another busy harvest and packing day. Just been going through with the students looking at like a morning routine of observing the beds and jotting down all the parties, jobs to do, things like that and how to organize the weekly workflow, which is a really valuable exercise. Something we're really working on at the moment in the gardens is really how to put in the time and look with your eyes at what's going on and how to use that to basically drive management decisions. And it's something that's not been going optimally so far. And so I'm trying to show people through that process of what I'm looking at and how to prioritise where to put attention. Open top. So this is what it looks like. We basically have everything chock a block to the ceiling. This is just before we pack out into bags and boxes to go off to restaurants and to our Ricoh shares. It's basically pretty full up. We're only using grey crates because we're temporarily storing things in these and anything vulnerable is bagged and ready to go. But time to pull things out very soon. So this mixture, beautiful Hakawai spring onions, radishes. We've got sugar snap peas, mesclun mix and then plenty of mesclun for restaurants. And scarlet grills. More spring onions, crab choy, more d' avignon relish. There's heads, turnips, loads of turnips coming out. Market garden crew digging holes in our no dig beds and micro's going out lettuce going up. Looks beautiful. First pack of toys coming out and we've got beautiful lettuces, lots of sort of crisp lettuce and we've got butter salad lettuce, both red and green, beautiful super dense lettuce heads. So two different bunches for eco. This is micros pak choy, scarlet frills, mustard sliver salad and two different lettuces. So we've got a red crispy lettuce here, green crispy lettuce here, super dense heads, really nice. And then a very aromatic sprig of mint and lemon balm. That's a beautiful salad based box. The other box is radish and hakaway turnip pea mescaline. So two different main choices for the boxes today. So we have just been delivering to Cafe Nistuga. We're actually on the lake in Arvika. Very nice little place and they sell ice cream. Who wants ice cream? Grace wants ice cream. Magna, you just woke up but you definitely want ice cream. So we've done our big delivery, now we're going for ice cream. So really nice to have guest trainers here to have different perspectives. Even though we follow very similar approaches in many ways, both being big advocates of no dig market gardening, we also have different sort of inner strategies and techniques and that's really nice to share those different perspectives with people. I'm also really aware of how, especially the people staying here longer term, how my voice doesn't become too important or too, you know, focused, central to their thinking, you know, so we're always looking at other people's work online and highlighting really good products, processes and farms and teachers elsewhere in the world. So today's been too flat out to get to make any video kind of footage or anything for a video here with Charles. But maybe tomorrow I'll get the opportunity to do that. So if you've got any questions or any topics you'd like to hear us talk about, then please put them in the comments below. We can maybe get to that tomorrow and I'll put a video out for our viewers. And I hope I know many of you watch both of our channels, so I thought it could be a nice thing to do. So let us know in the comments below. Hope you found that interesting. Just a few clips and really busy days, but really enjoying the hot sunny weather and seeing some good growth as a result. Got a lot of new crops coming in for next week, all the different turnips and we've got chard and kales and zucchinis and the first of the paddy pan squash and things. But thanks for watching our videos folks, really appreciate your views and comments and shares. I'll try and get an interview in with Charles before he leaves and so I look forward to posting that for you. See you in the next.
