Chapter 1: Tractoring / Chapter 2: Sheeping / Chapter 4: Wilding / Chapter 5: Pan(dem)icking / Chapter 6: Melting / Chapter 7: Fluffing / Chapter 8: Harvesting (Looking for my review? It’s here.)
Jeremy visits his local farm shop, the very posh Daylesford. He buys everything for a Ploughman’s lunch for him and Kaleb and it comes to over £80. Jeremy decides to open his own farm shop to sell their produce. He chooses a field with road access, next to a caravan site. He calls his builder, Alan, and they get to work with initial soil removal, which is possible before they get planning permission.
Jeremy’s Melody potatoes are ready to dig, and he’s delighted they have grown so well. Charlie tells him they need to need kept in the ground, the leaves chopped off above ground, for six weeks until the farm shop is built. Jeremy gets to work in Kaleb’s topping machine.
Jeremy researches local water and finds the nearby village Chadlington is named after St Chad, the patron saint of wells and springs. He discovers a clip of original Who Wants To Be A Millionaire host Chris Tarrant back in the 1970s, reporting on local anger when the village was switched onto mains water. (Jeremy later took over from Tarrant as the WWTBAM host and complains he’s always in the other presenter’s shadow.) Jeremy and Lisa take water samples from his springs and send them to a lab to be tested, as he wants to bottle and sell it in the farm shop.
Jeremy investigates wasabi as a potential crop. A whole one would cost £52 in the shops, the same price as half a tonne of carrots. He builds a pebble bed in one of his streams; the water has to be the right temperature and pH. He plants his wasabi, and thinks if they all survive he could make £5000 for the roots and £1000 for the leaves.
Charlie is worried about security, so Jeremy and Gerald secure the outdoor farm equipment with metal ropes. The villagers have objected to Jeremy’s farm shop planning permission application. He has to submit a business plan; planning permission is then granted. Alan starts building the shop, but the delay causes problems with the potatoes. Then it starts raining again and continues for days. The farm shop foundations are utterly waterlogged.
They begin to harvest the potatoes with the help of some local teens, and manage to bring in 16 tonnes.
Jeremy buys 60 hens. Hew wants them to roam around a small price of woodland he’s planted, and Kaleb informs him they’ll have to rebuild the fence around it with six feet of chicken wire. It’s backbreaking work. Lisa buys some brightly-coloured hen houses.
The lab results show the two springs are free from dangerous bacteria, but the pond serving Jeremy’s own house is not.
Some of the potatoes stored in the barn are starting to rot. He starts selling them from the road with an honesty box. The farm shop is coming along; Jeremy has to talk to the camping and caravanning club next door as he needs to run water and power from their site, and he worries that he’s never been kind about caravans. They agree as long as he makes a tongue in cheek advert for social media about the joys of staying on a caravan site.
Charlie tells Jeremy the corner of the farm shop field with the access gate doesn’t belong to him. Although he has the right to use it, there’s a restrictive covenant limiting the gate and that corner to agricultural use. Jeremy tracks dow the owner in the village who gives him permission for the shop access.
Jeremy decides to open the shop that weekend so they can sell the potatoes, though their “car park” is a quagmire. He publicises the farm shop via his millions of Twitter followers. But the hens haven’t laid enough eggs, and Charlie tells him he can’t sell the frozen mutton from the three dead sheep until they have hygiene sign-off from the council. He also needs to salmonella test the eggs. Finally, the sample bottles of water look awful as he’s used yellow bottles.
On the day of opening, after a very slow start there later find a huge traffic jam right down the road. They make over £1000 though there are still a lot of potatoes left.
The council closes the shop down; the roof needs to be slate, not tin.
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