A smallholding and learning market gardening

Bill Clark sets up his own smallholding and finds himself helping out neighbour Stewart with market gardening.When a power cut strikes and threatens a year's crop, Bill's mechanical skills come to the rescue!

tomatoes on the plant

Extract from a reading of Bill Clark's, former Warden at Wandlebury, autobiography - 'Route and Branch'

...In the spring – keen to learn more about market gardening – I joined a large tomato growing concern near Clacton, and besides helping put up a two acre, ‘Dutch-light’ greenhouse, worked in both lettuce and tomato houses throughout the summer. They were pleased with my work and wanted me to stay, but I had other plans. Our farm stock was coming along – we already had Saddle-Back pigs, hens and New Zealand White rabbits in our farm buildings – which Wendy looked after during the day – but I had held off from tilling any of the land, as the elusive owner had still not signed our agreement. Right next door to us was an eight acre holding with three one-acre greenhouses, and earlier I had struck a deal with the owner to repair his unused one during the evenings – he had a stack of years old greenhouse parts, and hundreds of sheets of glass – and expand his next winter’s crop of Freesias, which would provide extra income for the following spring’s heating. I gave him time sheets, with the condition that he could pay me whenever possible.

I had been shocked to find what a hand to mouth existence, middle-aged Stewart was living. Besides a third of his glass area being unusable – he couldn’t afford the repairs – he could only manage to heat what remained to grow the lucrative early tomatoes anyway. His outdoor land was uncultivated, and neither would he be able to plant a later tomato crop in the repaired house, because he could only manage to employ two part-time workers. I was now going to take on any part time work in the vicinity, to earn my daily bread, and till his land ready to plant Brussels sprouts and runner-beans. By February 1961, the repaired greenhouse was in full production of Freesias and the other two houses were stocked with tomatoes – then about 30 cm high – in a heat of never less than 70oF. The sixth of an acre propagating house staging was covered in three inch pots containing tomato seedlings. These would later take the place of the freesias as we cleared them. We also had plans to plant the un-staged side of the propagating house with a cucumber crop on straw bales – a new procedure that I had seen in the Clacton nursery.

On a particularly frosty evening, after spending the day working at a nearby farm, I were sitting reading, when there was a barrage of fists on the door: I flung it open to see Stewart standing in the lamplight, with tears streaming down his face. ‘Oh Bill, Bill,’ he cried, ‘I am finished, after tonight I will be bankrupt. And after all our hard work. But there is nothing I can do, I am so sorry.’ Mystified, I threw on my coat and rushed after him as he stumbled home. He had been watching the TV news, and it had been announced, that the rota of threatened power cuts would start that very evening. East Anglia would be off power until at least 6.00 am the next day!

I rushed over to the two automatic coal fired boilers, which provided the heat through 150 mm cast iron water pipes, and could just manage to keep 70oF in the two acres of glass during the coldest time. Each one was in a pit under an open fronted shelter, with a hopper of coal – lumps no bigger than sugar cubes – providing some twelve hours of fuel on full heat. I switched on the first light and climbed down, eyeing up the small, half HP electric motor, which was driving a gearbox via a ‘v’ belt. From the gearbox, one shaft slowly turned a screw below the hopper, and delivered coal into the furnace, and a second shaft spun a fan that forced air up through the grate to make a roaring fire: the water circulated under the momentum of heated water rising up into the houses, and cooled water returning. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ I called, and with no further explanation ran to his workshop/store....

Listen to the full reading by Chris Thomas of Bill Clark's chapter 6 part 1 of 'Route and Branch':
https://archive.org/download/ch-6a-essex-docks-market-gardening/Ch6a-Essex-docks-market-gardening.mp3