To be able to visit David and Anneke Blake’s Worton Organic Garden once was pleasure enough, to go along for a second visit with the garden in its Autumn glory was a highly privileged treat. To read more click on the post title or image.

The pressures and demands of creating and running a local, sustainabale food operation are intense when the ‘mainstream’ world is happy for soils to be wrecked and climates changed by subsidy-gobling factory farming. Nowhere Is that more apparent than at Cultivate Oxford. To read more click on the post title or image.

Dissatisfied with the “halal meat” available in the UK Ruby and Lutfi Radwan dreamt of starting their own farm. In 2002 they took the plunge, quit their teaching jobs, sold their house, bought a 45 acre plot of land in Oxfordshire, installed a caravan… and so began Willowbrook Farm! To read more click on the post title or image.

Coleshill is a quintessentially English village close to Swindon, just about on the Oxfordshire/Wiltshire border. Much of it is owned by the National Trust in the form of the Coleshill estate. The village has a long history which is extended into the 21st century by the presence of Sonia Oliver and her Coleshill Organics business! To read more click on the post title or image.

Iain Tolhurst has to be one of the legends of the sustainable, small scale farming scene. Producing fruit and veg now for over forty years, Tolhurst Organics is not only organic but certified ‘Stock Free’ – and indeed was the first farm in the world to achieve the ‘Stockfree Organic’ status attributed by the Vegan Organic Network. Through such a accolades, Iain is much sought after for his advice on market garden design and practices. To read more click on the post title or image.

I’d never seen a field of cannabis before, but there it was, right in front of my very eyes – and in rural Oxfordshire. And, it was all totally above board with the crop being grown with appropriate licence from DEFRA. Here was what might in time prove to be the beginning of usage of this remarkable crop for a whole plethora of purposes. To read more click on the post title or image.

David and Anneke Blake have created a quite wondrous space in the form of Worton Organic Garden. Its a lush and rich, seemingly chaotic melee of organically grown fruit trees and bushes, gloriously intermingled with vegetables and herbs, with a few animals thrown in, and, in the midst of it all is a small shop and artisan cafe – L’Arte de Mangier Bene – open Fridays and weekends. To read more click on the post title or image.

Giving up a successful career in engineering to become a farmer seems to run in the family at Sandy Lane Farm, a traditional, family-run, mixed livestock and market garden farm on the outskirts of Oxford. Judging by the evidence of the produce from the farm, such a background does not seem to get in the way of the farming! To read more click on the post title or image.