Webinar – Real-life Irrigation Stories – Tuesday 25th April 7-8:30 pm
Date Published: 29th March 2023
Join three experienced growers: Pete Dollimore, Iain Tolhurst and Dan Larke, as they share stories of irrigation systems they have known, loved, created and despised throughout their time as growers. This webinar leads on from the session last week to look at the application of irrigation knowledge in the field. It will be followed on Wednesday 26th by a closed session, limited to ten participants, where participants can submit their irrigation issues and get bespoke answers from these irrigation experts.
Pete Dollimore was formerly Director and Chief Grower at Hankham Organics, which has a 7000 m2 glasshouse at the core of a social enterprise supplying 500+ businesses and homes with vegetables and fruit each week. He studied Environmental Science at Aberystwyth University in Wales, is passionate about biological control, and writes and speaks nationally on the subject of organic growing. He now works at The Montessori Place, a school in Sussex, guiding the young people’s work developing a horticultural business centred around the school’s 1-acre-walled garden.
Iain Tolhurst has been at the forefront of the UK organic farming movement for over 45 years. His 8-ha farm has won many awards, and he has written several books as well as countless articles. His irrigation experience dates back to 1976 when during his first year of commercial organic production, there was the longest-ever UK drought lasting almost five months without rain. This event shaped his irrigation policy to ensure that his farming system was able to cope with an extreme event such as this. He has experience of large field scale as well as protected cropping and garden scale irrigation sources with water from boreholes and mains.
Dan Larke runs Glebelands Organic Produce Ltd, a 3-acre Market Garden on the banks of the river Mersey in Sale. He sells mostly salad crops wholesale to local shops, veg boxes and wholesalers. He worked on a basic irrigation set-up on a site he worked at before taking on Glebelands, where he then spent some time working with and improving the system he inherited. He is knowledgeable on the practical aspects of installation and running of a market garden scale system, the challenges along the way and making things work with limited resources.
See the other specialist irrigation sessions we are running in April here:
18th April 2023 – “An introduction to Small-scale Irrigation with Pete Dollimore”
26th April 2023 – “Growers Question Time: Your Irrigation problems solved: Pete Dollimore and Iain Tolhurst”
