‘Another Year Turns…’ | Autumn with Anna Young from C&M Organics

Once a month, we invite someone from our community to contribute an article to our blog. We love to share the voices of our volunteers, CSA members, supporters and growers in our network. This month, we welcome our friend & collaborator Dr Anna-Marie Young. She is a writer and grower at her family farm, C&M Organics in Hebron, Pembrokeshire - one of the growers who help us fill the gaps in our veg boxes. Her written work focuses on landscape and identity, but she’s mainly found knee deep in mud on her family’s organic farm. Over to you, Anna….

It is a Sunday in late autumn. This past week we’ve had storms that have further elongated a rip in one of our polytunnels and filled the lake with water again after a dry summer. Whilst my partner and I collected eggs from the chickens for breakfast and curled up on the sofa for Sunday breakfast away from the wind, my mum was knee deep in thick, rich earth, planting winter lettuce in one of the tunnels. 

This is what it is like, far away from the Instagram worthy posts of neat lines of weeded vegetables- just the earth and the plants and the stolen hours of work that should probably be used to rest, but instead are coveted as time to get ahead.

This year the spring was late, the frosts were fierce and on the calendar comparing progress, we were weeks behind where we were last year. And on top of the weather, we chose to have a baby in the middle of the season, taking myself and my husband out of the picture for a short while. The hardest thing for me, by far, was watching the crops and having no input. With a newborn I struggled to get out for even half an hour to defoliate the tomatoes, or cover the min till beds with compost and hay. It was frustrating letting go.

But when I am eager like this, competitive with myself and the season, it is mum that reminds me quietly that whatever happens with the weather, the year will always turn. The harvests and gluts will still come in, even if they’re planted a few weeks later, even if our time is stretched thin, even if they’re not the ones we’ve hoped for. This is what it is to have worked organically for nearly forty years, she knows the plants and the soil and the weather like they are extensions of her own self. Learnt patience with time passing.

Last year, when the pandemic hit, our small business was stretched beyond all limits. The requests for box scheme places came in thousands, and were tinged with fear and panic. Our farm shop closed its doors for the first time in four decades and instead opened a hatch through which we served as many customers as possible in the time we could find to man it. And each week we watched as our wholesale customers oscillated between famine and feast- the restaurants that were forced to close, the local shops suddenly inundated with customers again. And whilst we (my partner, parents and I) listened to the phone messages and answered emails and texts, whilst we tried to comfort the community that held close and supported us, we also went out to the growing fields, day after day after day, and sowed hope in the form of seeds. 

Each passing hour, as the seeds grew into shoots and the plants began to fruit, that fear of the unknown loosened its grip a little. And as the season ripened the community around us became stronger and more defined. We saw the same faces at the hatch week after week, we bought in as much as we could locally and from further afield to offer them, and we extended credit as far as we could possibly manage. Because this is the way my parents have always done business, firstly feeding people, and secondly making a living. 

When they began, before I was born, the honestly shop was not uncommon, but theirs became a singularity. As their growing expanded and the range of fruit and vegetables, local bread, dairy and organic wholefoods that they offered grew, it became more and more unique. Perhaps it is down to our community that valued what mum and dad offered that there were rarely incidents of theft, but I think also it must be down to human nature. To a response within us all when we are trusted with something and become a part of something, we treat it with respect.

Last year, in the middle of the season and the pandemic, mum fell off a ladder in one of the polytunnels and fractured her back. She was out of action for weeks, and whilst I have watched and learnt and grown with her, I am certainly not even half the grower she is. In the true spirit of our community we were inundated with offers, a friend took on one of our biggest rounds to free up more time for us in the fields. Another came and spent her evenings planting squashes with me in the field. And when my husband became ill, another ground of friends made meals and weeded my garden. At the shop people came with jars of wild garlic pesto and handmade marmalade, the dairy up the road bought bottles of organic raw milk and left them in our cold store for us. And each week for about a month the drivers returned with packages of flowers and baked goods from their rounds from our box scheme customers. 

Not only did these acts of kindness facilitate us continuing, but they filled our cup with gratitude and determination at a time when we were exhausted. And when the year ended with huge crops of tomatoes, with a tonne of squashes, of gluts of courgettes and salad and beet and peas, of winter crops heavy with leeks and swede, we knew they belonged not to those of us who had grown them, but to the community who valued them enough to carry us through. 

Characteristically, mum was back in the fields less than a month later, her argument being that if walking was difficult, at least she could crawl through the rows and weed. I have no doubt that even if we can convince her and dad to retire at some point in the future, her Sunday mornings will still be spend much the same; checking on what we’re doing, reassuring my worrying, hands and knees deep in the earth, connected to the community.