A few days before this seemingly endless rain started pouring down I had a phonecall from Liv O'Hanlon from The Great Elm Physick Garden. Liv's company makes gorgeous organic skincare products (www.greatelmphysickgarden.com) and is based about 6 miles away from the farm.
Liv contacted me because we had both attended a Soil Association workshop about growing and supplying organic herbs to the health and beauty industry which is a burgeoning sector of the organic movement at present. Currently over 85% of the organic herbs used in health and beauty products are imported from overseas, some are gathered from the wild and some are farmed in countries with much lower labour costs than you can find here.
I had attended the workshop because I had a surfeit of Calendula (English Marigold). In fact I had loads of it and a bit bright on the eye it was too. Anyway, I thought there must be someone who has a use for organic Calendula and maybe for some of the other flowers that we grow. The day was very interesting but I realised that supplying herbs for other uses would probably involve drying them first and that I would have to find time (and space in my head) to put together a drying system. I also thought that maybe the winter would be a good time to do some more homework and contact some of the manufacturers to see which crops they might be interested in.
A week later Liv made contact to ask if we knew where she might be able to find a large quantity of fresh Marigold.......what a perfect circle. The next day she came to the farm with her two teenage sons and quickly and efficiently picked 4.5 kilos of fresh flowers. She then took them back and dried them to an end weight of 0.8 kilos dried flowers and preserved them in Almond oil
Liv is thrilled that she has found a source of English Organic Calendula so close to home and I am very happy that our flowers can have two roles to play in the outside world. We are both now very excited about working together on crops for next year.
