Our story

Our story… (sorry this is quite long, so why not grab a cuppa before reading!)

After many years of dreaming, and a couple more of planning and searching for suitable land, Good Vibe Veg really started in April 2021. This was when we first set to work in our field at Horner Farm, a field in a stunning location with promising soil and position, but littered with nettles and thistles, and teeming with rabbits! We’d answered Holly & Mark’s call for someone to come and set up a market garden on their farm, which appeared just as we were starting to lose hope of ever finding suitable land. The stars had aligned, and the rest (as they say)...is history!

We set out with a mission to create an inspiring environment where we’d grow an abundance of local, healthy, seasonal food in a nature-friendly way, whilst offering social, learning, and well-being opportunities, for and with the community. The idea being that we could ‘grow community through community growing’.

We’ve both grown up loving the outdoors and being out in nature. With a background in nature conservation and education, Adam was now a gardener who loved growing food for his clients in their gardens, and many years earlier had thoroughly enjoyed co-running a tiny family veg box scheme with his dad and sister, whilst living in his van. Leighanne was a veterinary nurse, passionate about wildlife and travel, who was now finding joy in learning to grow vegetables at home with our two young children.

So, perhaps a little foolishly, we embarked on Good Vibe Veg without any formal horticulture qualifications or real commercial growing experience, but with a passion for growing our own food and bringing people together. We had a lot to learn! At first we persuaded many of our lovely friends and family to help, but then willing volunteers started arriving every Friday morning too, clearing weeds, creating beds and sowing seeds.

Having ‘settled down’ back in West Somerset after several years away, with a very young family now in tow, a sense of belonging and of creating a positive community asset was paramount to our plans. Set up as a non-profit, Community Interest Community, we wanted to address the relative lack of local, nature-friendly produce that was available in our area, and to do our little bit in trying to address the climate crisis and the huge problems with the global food system.

Why Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)?

Inspired by visits and courses at Plotgate CSA and Chagfood CSA, and particularly the warmth and generosity of the people we met there and on a start up programme run by the CSA Network, we chose the CSA model of farming / business for Good Vibe Veg. CSA offers such a supportive community-based, sustainable way to produce food and connect people with the land. We also chose to adopt no-dig and regenerative agriculture practices, aiming for healthy, living soils and rich biodiversity, and resilience to climate and economic challenges.

GVV would not exist without funding support, for which we are incredibly grateful. An initial small grant from West Somerset Green Forum, previously West Somerset Forum21, allowed us to research the idea and visit Charles Dowding’s garden, and a substantial one from the Somerset Climate Emergency Community Fund enabled us to put the infrastructure in place to start.

Further grants from Exmoor National Park (Partnership Fund and FiPL), Somerset Food Resilience, and Wootton Courtenay Gardening Club have since helped us to grow…quite literally!. We are also very grateful to our great friend Matt for designing our brilliant logo, to Lucy and Cerys for their encouragement and help at the beginning, and to the National Trust for getting behind this project on their land.

And now…

At the time of writing we’d say we’re nearly there with our mission, although new ideas and challenges are always appearing. There have been so many ups and downs over the past five years, and so much learning, but our field does now resemble an actual market garden!

It features forty-four 30m growing beds, fruit trees and bushes, a large shed for packing, storage, shelter and tea drinking, three polytunnels, rabbit fencing, a composting toilet, new hedgerows, rainwater harvesting, compost bins, an access track and a fantastic bug hotel (built by local children). It feeds around 30-40 households each week with healthy local food, throughout the year, through our veg share memberships, and many more through seasonal markets and wholesale at Toucan Wholefoods Shop and Cafe in Minehead.

And it positively buzzes with chatter and laughter, hard work and learning, on a weekly basis with our amazing team of volunteers, who we are incredibly grateful to. Then there’s the education visits and community events, giving people young and old the opportunity to experience what we are doing and why. And the strong relationship we have formed with our friends (and landlords) at Horner Farm. Our children are growing up amongst the veggies and this fantastic environment, devouring ‘broccoli lollipops’ as they search for bugs under logs, and worms in the soil.

It certainly feels like community is growing here, along with the many benefits to wildlife and planet. And long may that continue.