Meet the producers: parnsips
Breton growers showcase increasingly popular root vegetable
Le Jardin Potager de Loctudy, in Finistère, Brittany, was established in 1951 by Léon Larnicol, who learned to grow fruit and vegetables during his time as a prisoner of war in Germany. He had the luck to be assigned to a family who produced flowers and a few vegetables, so when he arrived back in France after the war, he started growing flowers on a small patch of land but quickly realised that people needed food not flowers.
The farm was taken over by Luc Larnicol and his wife Béatrice Le Douce in 1993 and they switched to organic farming methods nearly 20 years ago. “With all the chemicals we were using, and heating greenhouses to produce vegetables out of the season, we were polluting the earth, we weren’t in tune with nature. Oil tankers were spilling crude oil into the oceans to meet the demand for heating fuel, and we were heating our greenhouses but other people were dying of cold.”
Today, Béatrice and Luc run the 30-acre farm with a staff of around 12 people.They grow a wide variety of organic produce including parsnips and rhubarb, both of which are becoming increasingly popular in France. Twenty years ago, many people in France simply hadn’t heard of parsnips – panais in French. “Parsnips are still exotic in France. French people don’t really know what to do with them. They might add just one to a soup, but the English roast them, mash them, use them in all sorts of ways.”
They grow a huge variety of vegetables, because although they aren’t vegetarian, they find that vegetables offer more variety than meat, and there are so many ways to prepare them.
“We opened our own farm shop two years ago and it’s working well, although we were nervous at the start. But it’s great; we get to know our customers and people like the authenticity of buying direct from the farm. We work with other local producers so that we can offer other organic products as well as our own. We get a lot of British customers who really appreciate the freshness of our produce.”
www.lejardinpotagerdeloctudy.fr
