Goodbye London rat race, hello Shropshire good life

Daphne Du Cros steps onto a large tool known as a broadfork, using her body weight to break up the ground hardened by the baking sunshine.

"I was doing this when I was heavily pregnant," says the 32-year-old, the sweat glistening from her brow.

It has certainly been an eventful few months for Canadian-born Daphne, and her husband Dave.

A year ago they were living in a small flat in London. Then in September last year, three days after getting married, the couple quit the big-city rat-race to set up a market garden in Bishop's Castle. And if that wasn't enough, Daphne gave birth to daughter Isla in March.

"It's been quite a year," says Dave, 31, who works as a software engineer during the day, before helping Daphne in the field at nights and weekends.

"Fortunately Isla is a very chilled-out baby."

Of course, a youngish couple quitting a run-of-the mill existence for one of idealistic self-sufficiency is bound to draw comparisons with Tom and Barbara Good from The Good Life. But while the couple are proud that 80 per cent of the vegetables they eat are home grown, there is none of the make-do-and-mend improvisation depicted in the BBC comedy series.

Having turned Little Woodbatch into a mini-farm complete with ploughed fields and polythene tunnels, they have carved out a successful niche selling their produce at local farmers' markets and to nearby restaurants.

It is a professional operation which is growing all the time. At the moment they are farming about half of their two-acres of land, which had been largely unused for the past 60 years apart from grazing livestock.

One lesson they have learned is that farming in Britain makes you a hostage to the weather.

"The winter was a bit of a nightmare," says Daphne, referring the cold and frosty weather which continued right up until Easter.

"We started growing indoors, a neighbour very kindly ploughed a bit of the land for us, and we used tarpaulin to get rid of all the weeds."

"We started to feel like our time in London was winding down and that we wanted a different environment to raise a family," says Daphne.

"To us, this meant space for a child to play, learn, breathe clean air, and a place where we could live and raise baby according to our values."

Produce being grown at Little Woodbatch includes lettuce, rocket, beetroot, kale, radishes, courgettes, chilli and onions, while the large polythene tunnels house the tomatoes and cucumbers.

"They are going to be the difficult ones," says Dave. "The tomatoes and cucumbers are quite finicky, with the stuff we are growing outside we find that as long as the beds are prepared correctly, things want to grow."

It was a PhD course in food policy at London's City University which brought Daphne to the UK, while Dave is originally from the Wirral.

And Daphne says her studies were a major reason why the couple decided to make the move.

"In London we were aware that we were very disconnected from the process of food production, as most people are these days, and found ourselves at odds with the environmental and social impacts of industrial scale conventional food production," she says.

"This is a big part of my PhD research.

"We felt that seasonal, local veg could be grown intensively at a small scale without the heavy chemical inputs, that it could help rather than harm the environment, and could play a role in the community, through employment, supporting health, and where people could know their farmer and how their food has been grown."

While the couple use modern machinery where necessary, there is a touch of the wartime "Dig For Victory" about the way they use traditional hand-tools and methods to farm the land.

"We do have a small, walk-behind tractor, which we use when we have to, but we didn't want to become too dependent on petrol," says Dave.

"This is partly for environmental reasons, and it also keeps costs down, I would say we have spent less than £100 on petrol so far," he says. "But also by using the hand tools it means we can farm more intensively, planting our crops closer together."

Inevitably, there have been setbacks. Earlier this year, the couple discovered they had planted some of their crops too close together, meaning they did not grow correctly. Also, Britain's predictably unpredictable weather means they are never quite certain when their produce will be ready.

"What we find, now we are planting weekly, is that if one week's crop isn't quite ready, we can still use the previous week's," says Dave.

Daphne says the support of the community has been crucial to the success of their venture.

"It's a wonderful close-knit community," she says. "In the beginning, people walking along the public footpath kept asking us about what we were doing, and they were really supportive. We never thought there would be so much support in people growing vegetables.

"We provide regular updates on Facebook, and people seem to be really interested."

Dave says while keeping the farm is extremely rewarding, it is also extremely hard work, and he regularly works well into the night. He says the next project is to start producing vegetable boxes for customers to order on a regular basis.

"The advantage for the customer is that they will be cheaper, but it will benefit us because it will give us a regular income."

As for the comparisons with The Good Life, they are a bit over the couple's head.

"I'm aware of it, but I don't watch it," says Dave. "We don't have a television."