Hilltown Organics (2026)

28/10/2026

Autumn above the crop bars.
A canopy of rich vibrant earthy colours lift up the agroforestry polytunnel, right now grape vines scramble through apricot and almond trees from each end and the vines now meet in the center of the tunnel on crop bar wires which support annual vegetable vines during the summer, the grape vines negotiate the space above the wires with the towering perennial tree kale we have nurtured and bred and chicory seeding heavily feeding the garden birds. Over the years the grapes have tracked down the wires using their super sensitive new shoots and sensory tendrils wrap tightly to the crop wires and any support they touch. A few weeks ago, the crop wires were dripping with rich dark colour grapes packed with antioxidants.
It’s a spectacle of warming amber, orange, red, purple, so many brilliant ‘Dopamine-inducing’ colours that brings happiness, a sensory feast as the vines senesces before dropping the biomass of leaves. As with all deciduous trees, when days shorten and temperatures drop in autumn, grapevines also break down their green chlorophyll and seal off their leaves to prepare for winter dormancy which reveals the true colours of warm golds, fiery reds, bronzed, deep oranges, and earthy brown tannins.
There’re no neat edges to our wilded tunnels and this allows wildlife to visit the trees, vines and crops beneath and even over winter in a cosy dry environment.
The polytunnel regularly hosts dormouse, hedgehog, mole, gold finches, bluetits, robin, butterflies, moths, predatory wasps, hoverfly, toads, frogs, newts, carabid beetles, bumble bees, spiders, predatory shield bugs. The widest diversity of annual, and woody plants, the brash edges and plant residues generate a huge biomass that ends up on the ground as mulch feeding a staggering number of shredders and detritivores, this supports so much wildlife and maintains the soil organic matter for our crops, all this biodiversity keeps the soil energised and alive requiring no cultivations or outside inputs at all. The floor is a living mat of plant roots, worms, feral crop seeds, microbes, and a mycelium network mobilising every nutrient needed to produce nutrient dense food and pulling up moisture from stored reserves in the soil resulting in far less irrigation.
There's always some interesting happing in this tunnel, it's virtually always active with insects, birds and other wildlife, we pick delicious diverse salads during the winter, in February the Almond blossoms, in the summer we pick apricots, also enjoyed by the dormouse, the vegetables and herbs set seeds, lettuce and chicories flower, we harvest almonds in September. Who wouldn't be happy in a tunnel like this?

17/10/2026

October is our fungi month.
Sara & I always look forward to the fungi month of the year, October. Right now is a good time to get out and explore and celebrate fruiting Fungi, a celebration of nature connection, observation, we are all part of a vast amazing soil food web of life and stand on top as one of the vertebrates.
Soil fungi plays a critical role to the fertility of soil and production of food. They source, scavenge and cycling nutrients from the land. Without fungi, we wouldn't be here. They enabled plants to give the air we breathe. The everyday miracle green leaves give off oxygen that make our lives possible because fungi teamed up with plants and cyanobacteria in the predawn of time. Then to turn the carbon in the air into plant matter and food which sustains us 3 times every day.
The soil here literally fruits with an array of mushrooms where we have introduced a diversity of plants and trees, with more chances of a diversity of fungi now adding more spores to the health of the soil, land, air, food, wildlife and natures ecosystem.
Fungi don’t have leaves, and cannot photosynthesize, like us they have to find their food and digest it similarly to animals. They colonise log piles, brash edges, compost bays and woodchip heaps breaking down plant material into soil and food into a form that other animals can use as food,
In a teaspoon of good soil there is known to be 8 miles of fungal mycelium. Fruiting mushrooms all around the globe release the weight of 500,000 blue whales of reproductive spores into the atmosphere every year that can change the weather and can form rain and precipitate water droplets. Fungi literally glue the world together.
The mushroom we see are only the tip of the iceberg with the vast overlapping mass beneath the soil surface, like an apple on a tree they are the reproductive fruiting body that will grow and spread capturing carbon in a stable form.
Our human existence depends on a healthy soil food web, but as humans continue to interfere by felling rainforest, damaging ecosystems, and degrading soils with pesticides, we are reducing the ability to produce food as the natural world continues to be put at risk because of the way human have behaved.
Delve deeper into the fungal world, with endless discoveries and fascination, Fungi are everywhere, even on us, and inside the plant cells of ecological grown crops protecting them from disease. Fungi need our respect, they are damaged easily by deep cultivations, but some can help detoxify heavy metals from soil, eat radiation and microplastic pollution, and purify river waters.
Bringing trees into our agroforestry system have increased fungi here and lock up lots of soil carbon, we cultivate a few specialist gourmet mushrooms on coppice from the land that are great for gut health. There are many 1000s to discover, here’s a taster of the world of fungi we admire.
Whilst all mushrooms can be touched, smell and handled, we would stress never ever rely on phone apps and photo ID checks and eat unfamiliar wild mushrooms. We have witnessed false incorrect IDs.

07/10/2026

Squeezing in a couple of autumnal agriwilded planting days.
Asian greens, rocket, chicories, winter radish, hardy lettuce, kale, legumes, cover crop seeds, and alliums together as a diverse polycullture.
Outside, plantings follow sheet mulching to prep for planting through plant residues.
In the polytunnel, we ‘flip’ the summer crops and seeding biomass with ‘chop and drop’, dry stems and seed heads top up the paths. A mass of naturalised vegetables, herbs and edible w**ds germinate and fill the gaps of sown legume and greens.
No plant material leaves the growing areas. Haulm, pruning’s and trimmings are kept in the tunnels to create habitat, this is what generates the incredible number of insects and drives a healthy biodiverse ecosystem.
The diversity of plants, and the mass of plant residues increases the amazing biodiversity we are seeing here rising year on year. We can be productive, wild, ecological, resilient, capture carbon, enrich soil, and be rich in wildlife all at the same time in the same place without imported inputs.
Everything needed for building biodiversity and food production is all around us, all life is made of carbon fixed through photosynthesis. We’re growing and building soil carbon with no dig, agroforestry, polyculture-with annuals, perennials, cutflowers, leaving areas in rotation to seed and wild that builds the soil seed bank, using chop and drop and sheet mulching, keeping soil covered at all times which builds soil health, the outcome can only be more soil carbon, more humus, more biodiversity.
The diverse wild growing areas attract and support a wide diversity of life throughout the year. Including snakes, frogs, toads, newts, beetles, glow worm, earthworms, mole, seed and bug eating birds, raptors, snipe, thrush, woodcock, shrew, bank and field vole, harvest and dormouse, hedgehogs, fox, moths, butterflies, hoverflies, dragonflies, bumble bees, spiders, the agroforestry now brings owls, deer, fox and even dormouse right into the heart of what used to be open pasture.
If you like neat and tidy, it’s not pretty all of the time. Wild has order but isn’t neat and will look a mess to many. It takes a will to let go, let nature go through lifecycles, become part of nature, reconnect. what we have discovered is it’s become the best use of the little time we have as this system has evolved and now requires few hours to maintain where nature self manages, we call it agriwilding.
As Sara has recently pointed out posing a question to the two now celebrity Dereks, we are nature, we are part of the soil food web, we are also wildlife, what we are doing to nature, we do to ourselves.

06/10/2026

Any recommendations welcome for a local company contact who repairs loader ram seals please. Thanks.

30/09/2026

Seasonal delights we enjoy from diverse polycultures and food forest in the polytunnels. The Almond is the princess of flowering trees. A very different experience to dry processed almonds from the farmshop we sell.

30/09/2026

Savouring home grown delicious, soft, crisp and creamy Almonds in September from our polytunnel food forest.
The Almond is the princess of trees, and produces the first glorious tree blossom of the year right back in February. The mature fruits are ready to start picking in September once most of the outer fuzzy hulls crack open and split to reveal the inner nut shell.
These are the truest most organic tasting Almonds, picked mature fresh, straight from the tree to a pestle and mortar to crack the hard woody shell to reveal the creamy delicious kernels. They are incredibly different texture and flavour compared to shop bought dried processed nuts. A seasonal luxury that commercial processing simply cannot replicate.
Almonds aren’t a ‘true nut’, they are stone fruits closely related to their cousins peaches, apricots and plums. The Almond fruit comes in 3 parts, a soft fuzzy green outer layer which surrounds the hard woody shell, which protects the edible ‘pit’ or the kernel we eat.
Trees and vines have been an important feature in our polytunnels, they provide increased habitat, shade, temperature regulation, mulch material and delicious fruits in a multilayer cropping environment. Instead of bare soil beneath the trees as is necessary in industrial systems, we have a diverse under story of leaves, herbs, and vines.
Along with the Almond, we also have various other perennials including fig, Apricot, Olive, Rosemary, kiwi, raspberry, and salt bush. Other perennials include mashua, Oca, Fennel, perennial Kale, Sea beet, mallow, sweet rocket, mint and flower bulbs.
A huge diverse naturalised soil seed bank has been built over successive years of plants completing lifecycles now producing an abundance of self-grown free herbs, greens and salads, including celery, rocket, mustard, kale, spinach, chard, parsley, winter purslane, nasturtium, chicory, and sweet rocket, all of which produces a diverse biomass of plant material prunings which all stays in the tunnels as food, habitat, mulches creating a ecosystem and natural fertility cycle requiring no compost or digging.
In our location, we can’t grow Almonds that will yield outside yet, but in more favourable areas, south and east Devon, and microclimates of estuaries and coast, they really could yield fruit and should be considered to include in agroforestry and food forests. If anything, a guarantee of incredible blossom in spring being one of the most stunning and earliest trees to flower.
In February, various natural pollinators including some moths and early emerging bumble bees help fertilise the many pink blooms. Pollinators don’t like to work in rain, wind or cold, but the polytunnels provide a sheltered warmer environment for them.
Globally, 80% of the worlds almonds are grown in Californias central valley, a million acres of monocrop dry region where it takes a gallon of water irrigated to produce just one almond kernel.
Almonds are good for the heart and gut health, containing healthy fats, fibre, protein, magnesium, and vitamins but Industrial processing of almonds can damage nutrients being heat sensitive, many micronutrients, vitamins and antioxidants are lost through heavy industrial processing. Non-organic almond orchards are frequently treated with glyphosate, as well as synthetic fungicides and insecticides that has a detrimental effect on soil and biodiversity, and the quality of the nut.
The cracked hard shells will return to the polytunnel scattered through the beds as they make excellent habitat in the soil for beneficial microbes and which provide long-term slow release fertility as fungi breakdown the hard structure. It takes around a decade to breakdown and cycle nutrients. This helps create a mulch layer of w**d suppression, beneficial predator habitat, moisture retention, and slow nutrient release.

24/09/2026

Sexy Funky Kale.
Not any ordinary kale. This kale contains living microbial organisms. So much diversity has developed in our kale over 15 years, the aim is to provide a healthier nutrient dense veg, let the plants adapt to our very challenging conditions, strong robust stem, hardy to stand winter in the combined wet & cold and drought tolerant, become semi perennial, can maintain their own nutrient sources, look beautiful with texture, colours, frilliness and keeping them tender enough to eat throughout the year in a diverse way, including salad leaf.

Any cultivated, open pollinated plant can revert to be wild and more resilient. Wild and genetically diverse plants produce a wider array of polyphenols and flavonoids to survive in nature. These compounds act as powerful antioxidants in the human body and give those fruits and leaves that extra flavour now absent in much of our industrial food.

No leaf is the same from our adapted plants, genetically diverse plants retain higher concentrations of vitamins and minerals compared to modern monoculture crops bred for uniformity and shelf-life, which can dilute their nutrient density.

By now most consumers are aware of soil containing lots of microbes. But did you know healthy plant tissues also contain symbiotic beneficial microbes. These are called 'Endophytes'. Beneficial endophytes are naturally more present in wild plants, these are microbes (bacteria and fungi) that live inside plant tissues helping protect them from pathogens without causing harm. They offer many advantages and solutions to the multi crisis climate and environmental challenges ahead industrially grown plants like kale lacks. Endophytes help the plant absorb vital minerals naturally present in all soils globally, making the plant itself more nutrient-rich for human consumption, if you can source it fresh the way we grow ours, and from other ecological growers, they can be an excellent probiotic for the gut. Eating raw or minimally processed plants containing these healthy endophytes help support and diversify the human gut microbiome. What would a bucketful of those diverse salad leaves we grow agri-wilded to our gut do, we certainly feel the benefits!!!

We've learned how wild plants actively farm microbes, research shows that plant roots actively internalise selected microbes into their cells. These microbes provide the plant with essential nutrients and minerals, a whole different process to the artificial lazy fed agricultural method. Surviving microbes that aren’t broken down and consumed by the plant reproduce inside the plant cells, get fed with a cocktail of carbon/sugars from photosynthesis, this stimulates more root hair growth, some of them being released back into the soil to gather more nutrients. Endophytes travel through the plants vascular system including leaf, flower, pollen, and seed.
These unique microbes enable plants to adapt tweaking genetics, turning off and on genetic expression so that they adapt to changing conditions. What makes this farming different to industrial farmed seed is the next generation of wilded seeds passes microbes from parent to offspring to the next generation and already contains its beneficial microbiome before it germinates.
Working this way creating wilded resilient plants and harvesting such a wide diversity of leaf interacting with pollinators gives Sara & I joy and provides us with lots of harvestable leaves 52 weeks of the year.

Whilst brassica don’t form mycorrhizal associations with fungi like the majority of the plant kingdom, brassica plants like our population kale roots do have a symbiotic relation with and eat microbes alive. Those microbes attack and dissolve the cell walls of harmful competing microbes and fungi, protecting their host plant.
Growing kale as a diverse polyculture increases microbial diversity allowing kale to capture a wider array of opportunistic, growth-promoting endophytes from neighbouring companion plants with the Intricate, overlapping and root mingling systems. During the height of the growing season, the polycultures consist of many variety of veg plant species, as these are harvested, the polycultures of w**ds move in and include many native w**ds, including nettle, docks, grasses etc. The kales that have shown semi perennial expression will grow in subsequent years without w**ding, with and amongst heavy grass and w**d biomass which continually increases soil organic matter and habitat for beneficial biodiversity and naturally adding new kale seed to the soil seed bank where they sit dormant until we reset the veg beds with our no-dig mobile sheet mulching method.
A natural shield against soil pathogens. In a biodiverse planting, endophytic fungi establish dense, highly connected cooperative networks. This structural synergy assists core kale endophytes by creating a "balanced coexistence" that naturally blocks pathogenic strains like turnip anthracnose and club root. The increased network connectivity helps endophytes cooperate to produce natural antibiotics and lytic enzymes, shielding the host plant from diseases.
Wild plants have evolved to survive harsh environmental stressors, pests, and poor soils. To defend themselves, they produce significantly higher concentrations of polyphenols, flavonoids, and antioxidants.
Prebiotic carbohydrates and glucosinolates found in kale is known to play a role in aiding preventing obesity and cancer through improved gut health.
So if you’ve made it to the end and read this, I hope it’s helped explain how our kale is so very different to supermarket hybridised, lifeless, chlorinated, washed, plastic wrapped kale grown in over nitrate degraded soil that’s travelled 1000s of miles to the shelves, yet is fairly competitive in price buying direct, unwashed, often picked the same day it’s bought from the farmshop.
Pics show kales over past years and this years brassicas that were not hoed, or irrigated at all.
Brassica oleracea, wild cabbage without a head.

12/09/2026

Cultivating natural works of art. Enjoying the fruits of wood with quite a fruitful week of cultivated outdoor mushrooms here. A special seasonal flush of gourmet food from coppiced wood, a fungi that is a work of art.
Like the very best wines, the best Shiitakes take time to develop. From young saplings planted a decade ago, to coppice, then a 12 month incubation period to fruiting. In all weathers and insects, they develop strong immune systems. The grandmother oldest logs covered in moss and ivy we inoculated still produce, sometimes huge dinner plate size fruits eeking out every bit of nutrition from the wood and surrounding area the log is in contact with.
They’ve been on show this September with displays at the farmshop and demonstrations at the Devon Harvest Festival in Exeter. Available to buy this week through the Harvest farmshop.
Exposure to natural elements, humidity shifts, rain, warmth and temperature drops creates a nutrient dense, deeply flavourful, and meaty mushroom.
The beautiful, cracked, flower-like pattern often found on premium shiitake mushrooms is unique to outdoor grown log culture, a result of environmental stress and a slower growth cycle, which are inherently difficult to replicate in modern indoor controlled sawdust plastic column block labs.
A 1,000-year-old Japanese approach to grow sustainable mushrooms on tree Logs recognised in Japan as producing the best-tasting and textured Shiitake.
A powerhouse of nutrition, Shiitake is one of the healthiest and most nutrient-dense mushrooms. Log cultivation takes many months or years, giving the mushroom more time to absorb complex nutrients from the wood with significantly higher concentrations of antioxidants, phenolic and flavonoid compounds, and immune-supporting polysaccharides.
The logs themselves become habitat for beneficial creatures including lizards, beetles, centipedes, toads, and newts.
Want to learn more? Keep an eye out for Sara’s log culture workshops, or contact Sara for a talk or demonstration.

Hilltown Organics

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