Organic fruit and veg easy

Hands on ... Paul Benham Primrose farm. Photo: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Probably the most productive agricultural land in Britain situated in the foothills of the black mountains in Wales. Here, in a modest 1.5 acres, Dr Paul Benham and a handful of students and volunteers produce about 25,000 euros worth of organic fruit and veg each year. And the best bit is: you could replicate it in your backyard.

The variety and abundance here are alarming: five types of potatoes, half a dozen salad, seven Mustards. Herbs, mint, marjoram and oregano to soapwort, sorrel, heartsease and hyssop. Chard, onions, garlic, spinach. Beets, beans, courgettes, carrots, peas, leeks, cabbages. More than 100 varieties of Apple, pear, plum and nut.

Sale of products of the farm Primrose almost all within five miles, mainly to restaurants and in the weekly market of Hay-on-Wye, in a tent groaning with 30 varieties of spectacularly flavorful products. And the bar 1,500 miles per year on a Volvo assaulted for deliveries and a couple of litres of diesel tractor for a 60-year-old used at most once a year, Benham does everything almost without fossil fuels.

He calls this high biodiversity, polyculture of low carbon – working with nature, not trying to control it. Is a flexible system which he argues can survive peak oil, even climate change. On the other hand modern, energy-intensive, heavily subsidised monoculture – single crops cultivated in large fields using copious chemicals and heavy machinery – seems unstable and increasingly untenable. "This shows that it is possible," he says. "A food system in harmony with the environment".

How it does it? Benham of develop your vision of low impact to 25 years in Primrose. It begins in a greenhouse, where seeds germinate in freezers long-dead, but still well isolated, each heated with a low energy light bulb before young plants are moved out.

There is a very important compost pile and two worm composting bins, and more, in addition to the four main regions of farm, rotated between potatoes, peas and beans, cabbages and salads and roots and onions. Crop rotation helps to help control pests and improve soil structure and fertility: each solo works differently. In winter, Benham plants "green manure" (vegetation that covers the bare soil rapid, smothering weeds and enriching the soil) and black plastic sheets lay about raised beds to lock in nutrients. Is about to interfere with the soil as little as possible.

Growing under fruit trees of the farm is fruit bushes, but also that Benham calls "bad smelling herbs": mints, lemon balm, tansy. The carrot root fly, he points out, can smell a carrot out of 200 metres and they put them out of the perfume. (Similarly, a swamp-garden of 70 wild plants and herbs attracts Predatory insects, as focus-flies and poxviruses who eat aphids injurious. A squadron of ducks is efficient hunters) slug.

Further, the farm's forest garden is designed to mimic natural woods. Facing South, at ground level, is soil cover crops, such as wild strawberries. Back may be slightly taller rhubarb, or globe artichoke, then Low shrubs and bushes, as tayberries and currants. Further back are dwarf apple and plum trees, and finally large fruit and nut trees with crops to tolerate the shadow below, like a carpet of wild garlic.

There is nothing to stop anyone doing this at home, says Benham. It is a matter of designing carefully. Rotate your crops, feed them well, remove the infected parts fast, does not offer any single destination confuse pests with strong smelling plants and attract predators of pest-eating with others as fennel, chervil, asters and Marigold.

And to eat? Obviously, food produced this way and eaten soon after separation did not lose their qualities and super-good is for you. Preserve the enzymes and nutrients not cooking it to death: eat raw; or cook on a low heat.

Lunch chez Benham is a festival of extraordinary flavors. Beets and grated carrot. Steamed Swiss chard and ground elder. Sprouted lentils. Rocket Pesto. Duck eggs hard. Vegetable Pate with carrots and sunflower seeds. A hummus of raw sprouted chickpeas. Quince cheese. And a salad of Lion, sorrel, sweet cicely, taken by hedge, clover, Borage, Nuphar, chickweed, red and green lettuce and three kinds of mustard. All followed fresh fruit. It worked for me, and it certainly works for the planet.

? Primrose Farm runs gardening and cooking courses: primroseearthcentre.co.uk

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