Parkside Farm Pick Your Own (pyo) fruit and vegetables

Parkside farm pyo pick your own enfield middlesex

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Fruit:

Strawberries
Raspberries
Tayberries
Blackcurrants
Plums
Blackberries
Gooseberries (ready-picked only)

Vegetables:

Broad Beans
Spinach / Swiss Chard
Courgettes
French Beans
Onions
Beetroot
Squashes (4 varieties)
Tomatoes
Marrows
Sweetcorn (supersweet)

Website by Zonica

Our family have been farming at Parkside Farm since 1938, when it was a mixed dairy and arable farm. We still have some arable land (i.e. wheat/beans/oilseed rape) and grassland, but sold our 140 dairy cows in 2002.

We first grew strawberries for Pick-Your-Own back in 1979 on a fairly limited scale (i.e. 4 acres), but have subsequently added many other fruit and vegetable crops. The total PYO area is now close to 50 acres with about 20 different crops grown!

A crucial element to growing these crops is access to water for irrigation. We built our own reservoir in the 1983, together with an extensive network of underground mains. We subsequently added more complex drip irrigation systems, which can be controlled from the farm.

Over the years our fruit and vegetable crops have also benefited from the generous use of farmyard manure (courtesy of own cows in the past and now our neighbour`s cattle), which greatly helps soil fertility, and ultimately the quality of our produce.

“Table-Top” Strawberries

In recent years we have been investing very heavily into producing strawberries on a “Table-Top System”, which means you can pick without bending down! The plants are grown in troughs filled with peat, supported by a steel structure, and crop for 2/3 years. When the plants are finished, the troughs are emptied out, composted and spread onto our grass fields. Most of our production will be on this system by summer 2010. We also utilise different varieties and techniques to spread the harvest from early summer, right through to first frosts in the autumn.

Other Recent Developments

These include the setting up of an area of “Potted Raspberries” grown in peat, which should alleviate the soil-borne disease problems we have with some varieties (notably “Glen Ample”). We have also recently introduced two new varieties of Raspberries called "Cowichan"(main season) and "Himbotop" which is an autumn fruiting variety and comes highly recommended for fruit quality.

We continue to experiment with Tomatoes, with variable degrees of success, depending on the season. These are grown, together with our Squashes, on fully degradable black plastic that is made from maize starch!