Interview
Farm shop revolution
Houseplants and gifts are an expanding category at Carpenters.
Carpenter’s Nursery & Farm Shop in Hertfordshire is building on its history as a traditional farm shop and appealing to a new and growing audience tempted in by the tasty café menu and select garden range.
H
ertfordshire’s oldest farm shop is soon to celebrate 100 years of trading, and now with James Carpenter at the helm this independent and family run business, which to many has been a bit of an industry secret, is putting itself firmly on the garden centre map. The farm shop is still the heart of the business and one of the few growing a significant proportion of the fresh fruit and veg sold on site. James knows this is the company’s usp and since he took over six years ago has used it as the foundation on which to expand. “We’ve always grown
6 August 2022
Above: James Carpenter.
our own and I remember as a kid in the late 1980s before supermarkets opened on a Sunday there would be a queue of 15 people out of the door coming in here for fruit and veg,” he says. James is honest when he says growing the fruit and veg isn’t a big money spinner now but adds: “It brings people through the door and without that we are just the same as everybody else.” It was James’s great grandfather Fred Carpenter senior who started growing veg here in 1923, when he took tenancy of one of six houses, sharing a 12-acre plot after the first world war as part of the government’s
‘Land Fit for Heroes’ scheme to help exservice men provide for their families. Out of the original six, only Carpenter’s Nursery & Farm Shop remains. The others have gone but James continues to live in the house and be a tenant of Hertfordshire County Council. Fred grew vegetables and flowers which were sold at local markets and on the side of the road and it wasn’t until the 1960s when Fred junior joined the company that more glasshouses were built, the range of plants expanded and the site opened up for people to choose plants directly from the growing area. “It wasn’t really customer
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