Bob and Ann Paton share their journey from city life to Hexhamshire Organics with Dean Bailey
Bob Paton always wanted to be a market gardener, while his wife Ann couldn’t wait to get out of the city.
“We were living in Gosforth, Newcastle and had a great little allotment, which we loved. But we wanted to get into Northumberland, find a stone-built cottage full of character and have some land,” says Bob as we walk the couple’s orchard.
Until he retired last summer, Bob, a software developer, headed up North East operations for tech giant Accenture. A well-known face in business circles, he was awarded a CBE for services to IT skills and apprenticeships in the North East and had every right to put his feet up after retirement. But he and Ann, a former home economics teacher who ran a deli business in Jesmond, are now getting to grips with life on a small holding.
Having bought their Hexhamshire cottage with six acres in 2011, the couple have spent the last year establishing their enterprise. They have five Tamworth pigs, 35 chickens, four ducks, four colonies of bees, an 80-tree fruit orchard, a huge veg plot, a herb garden and four polytunnels.
Their organic veg boxes are delivered weekly across Northumberland and you’ll find
Bob, Ann and their picture-perfect veg cart at Jesmond food market and Morpeth farmers’ market
every month.
As I say, quite a change for businessman Bob, who, despite the pigs, also turns out to be a vegetarian. “As a vegetarian, I never thought I’d keep pigs for a start,” he says. “But it’s been my life’s ambition to be a market gardener, having grown up helping my dad with his two allotments in Ashington. I’d spent 38 years working in technology and I knew I had to take the chance and do this when I still could.” Thus, when he retired last July aged 59 and 354 days (he’d always said he’d retire in his 50s) he and Ann were ready to get started.
There has been a good deal of trial and error – Bob bears the scar of a tussle with the Tamworth boar, but he has perfected the art of duck herding – and they haven’t looked back for a moment. “I love the process of taking a seed and watching it grow into something you can eat,” says Ann, and, having started with four pastures, the smallholding is now beginning to look like Bob and Ann’s vision, though there remains much more to learn. Thirty silver birch trees, a retirement present from Accenture, have just been planted; there’s a paddock which may be given up to donkeys; and 17 piglets are arriving in the near future.
“We knew a bit about gardening and growing vegetables, but we’ve had to learn a lot,” says Bob. “There are only so many big jobs you can do and now we have the tunnels set up, the orchard planted, the pigs settled and the barn built, we’re hoping next year we’ll be able to get into a good routine.”
If you’re going to throw up your life and escape to the country, you’d better have a strong partnership, and Bob and Ann are equally enthused. “We’ve worked hard and we’ve proved we can do something different,” says Ann. “We’ve made mistakes, but it’s been fantastic; we couldn’t have a better lifestyle. Everyone who has a dream of doing this should get out and do it.”
We leave with a box of veg and eggs to be transformed in the appetite kitchen into dinner (see recipes over the page), plus our own dreams of the Good Life. In the meantime, our order for a weekly veg box is in. www.hexhamshireorganics.co.uk
We came away from Hexhamshire Organics with a basket of amazing veg and eggs. Here’s what our editor Jane Pikett did with some of it…
