Harvest Summer

Yeah, first run of beans of the season. My name's Jono Smales. We've been farmers here since 1969. A three-generation family. I look after the farm and the organic vegetables. We're all muddy boots farmers. There's no sort of office management here. Dad's up early hours of the morning. There's no job Dad won't do. And there's no job that us kids won't do either, because that's how we've been brought up. My mum was really into food, yeah. At a time when it wasn't groovy to be into food as well. Back in the 60s, there weren't all these celebrity chefs all over the place, and she used to breed Mrs Beeton. That was her go-to source of information about how to do a lot of stuff. I really am against sort of fancy, not proper food. You know, stuff that's just a long way from source. So I've got a friend, and her theory is you just want to eat food that's as alive as you can. The organic season normally kicks off sort of early May. May's a really key month, because we get a lot of the early crops established. We get into June, and then we start harvesting. At the moment we're harvesting a lot of courgettes. We're starting French beans this week. We've finished broad beans. I just wanted to do the summer season, and then I was going to go off to uni and do whatever I was going to do. And then I just sort of fell in love with it, and I've stayed, and then I went on to supervising. I just love it so much, more than I should probably. My son William, his idea of success is the number of goldfinches, or whether we've got a barn owl. These things are really, really important to him. Sometimes people can lend you their eyes, and Will does that. So you'll see... Look at that hole in the tree there. That's where a woodpecker's made a hole, but it's probably eaten the such-and-such chicks out of someone else's nest or whatever. And he's into the entomology or the whole food web. A lot of people ask us why we never get blackfly and broad beans. It's just because we've got a natural bank of predators here which do all the work for us, and that's the result of not using pesticides for 20 years on that land. For us, the soil now is so fertile that we could actually grow crops without having to put anything on it at all. My thoughts are, you look after the soil, and the soil looks after you. There's so many people that will just work with no gloves on, and it doesn't even sort of cross your mind that there might be anything harmful. The worst you can do is put your hand in a slug. When you see them going into the ground, they're so tiny. They're just two little leaves sticking out, and you put them in, and then you come to pick them. And these are such nice lettuces here. They're looking so good, and they're so easy to pick. I don't know if you've noticed now, the colours have changed a bit. It's just starting to go off, isn't it? So that vibrance of spring, it's almost iridescent. End of July comes along, and it's looking a little bit darker, isn't it? And then August is just beginning at the end.