South Wales

The Vale of Glamorgan (in the deep South of Wales) has a long and proud history of agriculture, but it wasn’t used for large-scale vegetable production for quite some time. Why? Well, farmers seemed to think that it was easier to grow crops in other parts of the UK, then haul them around the country in huge lorries to wherever they needed to be.

That's fine by us, (not the lorries bit) because it means that for the last 3 years, we’ve been growing our vegetables and daffodils on soils that haven’t seen crops like this before – and when you add, what growers call “ a new rotation”, it means whatever you grow, grows better than ever!

So other than crop change, what else is great about South Wales? Well lots of things really, but it’s the climate our cauliflowers and daffodils love, mild winters and cooler damp summers plus excellent soils. It’s nothing short of a harvesting miracle and it allows us to grow and harvest our huge tasty cauliflowers all winter long, which means that, rather than cauliflowers from Cornwall (have you seen the M5 on a Friday) or Brittany, its Really Welsh Cauliflowers for our winter Sunday lunches. Seems to make sense to us.

Climate control: A lot of it’s down to how close we are to the Bristol Channel. That acts like a kind of giant blanket in the winter, to stop frost getting in and doing its damage, while in summer the cool on-shore breezes it produces stop the crops from drying out too fast. Anything growing in fields further inland starts to stress - not so for the Really Welsh crops, they’re living it up in their coastal paradise.

Above - Where we grew Really Welsh Cauliflowers for winter 2006/2007 in the Vale of Glamorgan.

In this section:
North Wales