We have been buying our mushrooms from Capel Mushrooms for some 8 years now and I therefore thought it long overdue to find out more about them.

Capel Mushrooms was started in 1961 by Squadron Leader P J Hearne. Born in India, he was sent to be educated at a boarding school in Belgium. Between the ages of 5 and 18 he barely saw his colonialist parents. He became an Ace Fighter Pilot during World War II flying Mustangs and Spitfires. He thankfully survived and was decorated for his bravery. At the age of 42 he retired from the airforce and invested his pension in the house and 5 acres where he was to create his mushroom farm. With a wife and eight children to support, the early years were a struggle. He had had no previous experience of any form of horticulture, but his determination, courage and the combined family effort made it a success.

In these early days mushroom beds were doused in insecticides, pesticides, formaldehydes and chlorines and to some extent still are today in conventional mushroom farming. Squadron Leader Hearne found that he was using less and less of these chemicals and decided to try using no chemicals at all. He found it surprisingly successful and 15 years ago they became probably the first mushroom farm in Britain to become registered as organic. Damien, Nicky and Patrick, three of his children, have taken over the running of the enterprise. Now 83 years old, their father still wanders around "checking" and today he attended a seminar on composting.

Mushrooms are a fungus. Cultivated mushrooms are bred through hybridisation from field mushrooms. They are a natural product and have not to date been subjected to any genetic modification. The brown variety contains more dry matter than the white thus they are more nutritious. They are also more similar to the field mushroom. Mushrooms bear a close resemblance vitamin-wise to meat which is why they are invaluable to vegetarians. They contain the B-complex vitamins: riboflavin, niacin and pantothenic acid as well as essential minerals: potassium, copper and selenium. Both selenium and riboflavin are hard to get from a vegetarian diet. New research in the USA is suggesting that mushrooms have properties that can prevent breast cancer, which means that if we eat more mushrooms we can drink more alcohol. ( I refer of course to recent reports linking alcohol to breast cancer). Patrick prefers to cook with older, more crinkly mushrooms as he believes they have a better flavour than when freshly picked.

The mushrooms are grown in compost in large, temperature-controlled sheds with tiered shelving. It takes 6 weeks to make the compost from organic wheat straw and manure. It then takes another 6 weeks to grow the mushrooms once the fungus spores have been introduced. The spores are bought in, this is because the procedure to collect them and attach them to grains of wheat for a carbohydrate kick start is very specialised. It is also a process where there can be no human contact as we are too dirty.

The mushroom 'fruit', mycelium, will not surface from the compost while in a state of equilibrium. It is only when under threat of survival for their species that the mushrooms surface with the intention of throwing out billions of spores. Threatening conditions are therefore recreated in the barn. At the desired moment of their life-cycle, the build up of carbon dioxide levels are reduced by three-quarters to 2000 parts per million and the temperature is set at 18 degrees, the mushrooms then start to appear.

If all goes well there is a yield of 5lbs per square foot. However, as in every world, there are enemies. The three main enemies of the mushroom are verticillium and dactylium which are competitor moulds, and mycogone,a competitive fungus - they are ever present in the atmosphere. If any of these get a grip on the bed, the solution is to either apply salt to the patches affected and surrounding areas, or if particularly bad, to steam-sterilise the whole barn killing everything in it. Patrick reckons to lose in excess of 10% of his potential harvest. He tells me that the key to successful mushroom farming is good compost production and impeccable hygiene.

The farm has two sites - one in Trimley, outside Felixstowe and one in Capel St Mary near Ipswich. They are large employers in the area, with 10 full time and 40 part time staff. They contribute in many other ways to their local community including sponsoring the local football teams. The UK mushroom industry is in a bad way, over 50% is imported from countries like Holland and now Poland. Two of their neighbouring mushroom farms have gone out of business in the last few years. Thanks to the foresight of their father to go organic, Capel Mushrooms is a success story and they have managed to carry on expanding.

With the exception of one brother, they are a family of devout Christians. Business permitting they attend church together each Sunday and come home to a late breakfast of ………. mushrooms.

Andrew Ward is as busy as ever on his 40 acres near Canterbury. He grows a great diversity of crops to supply ourselves as well as their own small box-scheme and farm shop. He tries to avoid growing large quantities of any one thing which would inevitably mean having to try and sell to one of the supermarket packers. He has been very pleased with this year's crops. He grew a lot of Kestrel potatoes for us which featured in the boxes throughout September - they are white with purple eyes. He was relieved to have sold virtually all his potatoes off the field. There is always a race against time, once harvested, organic farmers must be rid of their potatoes by early spring otherwise they go soft and start sprouting as do carrots, onions and many other vegetables at that time of year. Conventional farmers spray, amongst other things, a chemical called tecnazene, a sprout inhibitor, this enables them to be stored for longer.

In the bags this week are his cauliflowers. The quality has improved greatly over previous years and he has attributed this to the sowing of green manures: vetches, which are nitrogen fixers and rye, a nitrogen lifter. The rye has deep, searching roots and brings up nutrients for less well endowed plants. The vetches and rye are sown to improve fertility, he plants them everywhere that crops have been.

There is a great and mysterious ecosystem at work beneath us. It is said that there are more than a billion living organisms of more than 10,000 different species at work in a gram of healthy soil. We have a soil foodweb which is made up of microscopic nematodes ( tiny worms ), protozoa, soil mites, fungi, bacteria and other plant, insect and animal life. … apparently only about 5% of these species have even been identified. As to the complexity of what they all do and how they combine to sustain life on earth - we would need another Darwin. He would by now have written hundreds of volumes classifying them all and revealing these microscopic relationships as he did with worms. John Humphrys in his book 'The Great Food Gamble' talks about this "least explored and least understood environment on the planet…….the last frontier." He suggested that it is the only place that David Attenborough hasn't been.

Micro-organisms were present in the soil a billion years ago and enabled plantlife. Bacteria and fungi are vital to the soil. The more microbes present, the richer is the soil and the more life it can support. A desert soil has around 1 million bacteria per gram and a healthy soil, around 600 million. The roots of plants exude food molecules to feed bacteria and fungi which, in turn, provide the plant with essential nutrients. They also form a shield around the roots which protect them from disease.

Bacteria are the most concentrated form of nitrogen on earth. If they have enough food they multiply. They gather inorganic nitrogen from the soil and convert it into protein as a means of storing it. The bacteria attach themselves to soil and organic matter thus nutrients are retained in this way. Vetches have root nodules to which bacteria attach themselves - Andrew by planting these, is fixing nitrogen and nutrients in his soil and improving fertility.

Pesticides and artificial fertilisers reduce this nutrient cycling and diminish crop vigour. They also kill beneficial organisms allowing pathogens to thrive. This increases their dependency on chemicals. The process ensures that the soil becomes a mere dirt in which only pathogens can survive.

Bacteria and fungi physically bind themselves to soil particles which then bind to each other to produce clumps of earth. They also bring about decomposition of crop residues and manure. They are vital in the composting process, breaking down organic matter and recycling nutrients into forms that plants can absorb. Well-made composts inoculate the soil with every possible beneficial micro-organism.

Returning to his book - John Humphrys describes the 'macro' through to the 'micro' picture of what happens to a cowpat. He describes how when the cow has moved on, an army of creatures including earthworms, snails, mites and nematodes take over. They break it down into tinier particles with large surface areas. They then mix the organic matter with minerals in the soil and fungi and bacteria, crucially taking it below the soil surface. Then, below the surface - the fungi and other bacteria and organisms get to work on it. When these fungi and bacteria die and decay they release minerals locked up in their cells to the benefit of the plants that are rooted in the soil.

It is not hard to deduce from all of this, that by spraying millions of gallons of pesticides and fungicides onto our soils, we are at least upsetting the delicate balance of this ecosystem, or at worst, destroying it.

Sir Albert Howard in The Soil and Health in 1947 wrote " The fertility of soil is the future of civilisation".

Lady Eve Balfour in The Living Soil in 1943 wrote " If we destroy the soil - and it is not indestructible - mankind will vanish from the earth as surely as dinosaurs ".

HJ Massingham wrote in The Wisdom of the Fields in 1945 "… organic agriculture is essential because there is no other way of feeding the peoples of the world with food enough. By food I mean nourishment from which the vital properties have not been removed or sacrificed by modern ingenuity in evading organic laws for profit's sake. There is no other way of maintaining fertility of the soil, that is to say, of passing on human life from age to age. There is no other way of building up resistance to deficiency diseases in man, beast, plant and soil……the organic way is, in short, the only one that can bring us within the influence of those everlasting principles that govern mortal life. "

In the 1940s many farmers were elated to discover the joys of spraying tar-oil distillates, nicotine washes, lead arsenate sprays and DDT onto their crops. Things haven't moved on so far since then.

It is maddening when we take a look at the lush, fertile soils that nature has bestowed upon England and then we look across the world to the deserts and scraggy terrains where peoples subsist on lands with no fertility and no water, struggling endlessly against famine and disease. Through systematic abuse of natural systems we create our own diseases like BSE, we pollute and toxify our soils and our environment. We still have only 2% of our agricultural land registered as organic.

Andrew, as well as cauliflowers, has planted Celtic and January King cabbages, kale and leeks for the autumn. He is out sowing broad bean seeds at the moment for harvest in May of next year. He prepares ridges and "pops them in with a dibber" they will grow 3-4 inches before Christmas and resume growth in the spring. We had given him Heritage Seeds last year from which he was able to grow enough plants to bulk up the seed numbers for a proper crop next year.

Andrew is the son of Mike and Barbara Ward, they have been supplying us since the start when we were based in my flat. They used to come to deliver to us at the dead of night with a trailer full of produce and a landrover full of sheepdogs. We would talk for hours in those days. The farm has always struggled. When Andrew came out of Rye Agricultural College he took over the farm while Mike, who had gone from chemistry teacher to coach driver to fisherman to farmer/coal deliverer, developed his haulage business. Annette is Mike's daughter and it is she who grew the pots of herbs that you had over the summer. They have always had a hard time making ends meet. Barbara had a poor sister in Wales who lived in a shack.

One day her sister called to invite them to Paris for a weekend. They turned up in a brand new car with brand new luggage. They had booked suites in the best hotel in the Champs-Elysees and spent the weekend eating in the best restaurants, no expense spared. Barbara's sister never offered any explanation as to where the money had come from and Barbara was too polite to ask. Over the next year her sister bought a huge house overlooking Cardiff, built an Olympic-sized swimming pool and gym, bought numerous Bentleys and other cars, they bought a house for each of their daughters. They were spending millions.

This was a couple of years ago and to this day her sister has not mentioned where the money came from and Barbara is still too polite to ask. Unfortunately I am not so polite and keep asking Andrew if they have found out yet. They suppose it was a massive lottery win.

One of you mentioned in a letter to me that I keep sending questionnaires out and that you keep filling them in, but nothing ever happens. I am sorry if that is how it seems. The grocery catalogue was completed some time ago, the problem has been the new computer system. What we thought and were assured was going to be a straightforward process to enable us to take grocery orders, turned into a nightmare. We have had months of double entering all our data onto the new and old systems but the new system has been full of errors and glitches that we have had to work through. However, it is nearly done and we hope to launch the catalogue shortly.

In relation to the clothes - thank you so much to those that filled out that particular questionnaire, the information you provided has been an invaluable guide and you have given me some fantastic ideas.

I am painfully interested in other people's lives so also found it fascinating to discover more about you generally. I didn't realise we had so many customers who are actual fashion designers - that is when reality strikes. Two of you have offered to help, so that is brilliant.

I have decided to do some men's cashmere jumpers too, and am embarrassed to not have considered this in the first place. I went to Spitalfields market with a male friend some months ago and was horrified that there was not one stall selling items for men. That should have made me realise my sexist intentions. One customer asked me specifically for mens jumpers for her partner because she couldn't be bothered to knit him any.

With it being a brand new project it is taking time as I have to learn as I go along. My aim is to have the garments ready in the late summer for early autumn of next year.

I hope you are enjoying the selections of fruit and vegetables at the moment. Our carrots, parsnips and swedes are coming from the North Yorkshire Moors as always from September to March. Our potatoes are currently from Edwards in Lincolnshire and Mr Morris in Herefordshire and our spinach, lettuces, brussel sprouts and leeks are from Devon. Our apples and pears are from Kent along with cabbages and cauliflowers. Our aubergines, oranges, lemons, tomatoes, courgettes and peppers are from Sicily. Please let us know if there are any ways in which we could improve either on our selections or our service to you.

I hope this letter finds you fit and well. Thank you as always for your support,

Kind Regards

Isobel Davies