Of all Britain’s food secrets, Country Markets food cooperative has got to be one of the most puzzling. For a start there are over 450 stalls and shops across England and Wales selling local, seasonal, astonishingly fresh food. They have all the right-on credentials you would expect from any self-respecting farmers’ market. Even better, they are really good value.

On a sunny April day at Chichester Country Market in Sussex, Valerie and Melvyn Holford and other volunteers are bustling around in green and white striped butchers aprons selling vegetables, eggs, preserves, baking and plants. The compact stall, next to an organic deli and a gourmet sausage maker in the town’s Buttermarket has been stacked and packed with jars and boxes - and a surprising amount of greenery. Bunches of rhubarb - smaller than you would find in the supermarket but delicately pink and tender-looking - line the back shelf.

“Oh yes, Mrs Alwyn’s rhubarb. This is the first of the spring crop but she forces it in winter – just shoves a pot and a bit of straw over the top,” said Mr Holford, 71, who is Chichester’s country market chairman.

There is also some beautifully fresh-looking chard. All this from a market that used to be run by the Women’s Institute, an organisation better known for cakes and conserves.

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“Most of the markets sell fruit and veg,” said Mr Holford, “Mainly from members’ gardens. Cauliflowers, cabbage, carrots, onions, in season we have tomatoes, broad beans, salad.”

This year at Chichester, they are missing Mr Tarrant’s produce. He has recently moved away and they are feeling the loss. “He used to come in with armfuls of fruit and vegetables - blackcurrants, gooseberries, kale, potatoes, pears – you name it he grew it. He had quite a lot of land,” said Mrs Holford, Chichester secretary and the backbone of the operation.

Country Markets, or Women’s Institute markets as they were known until quite recently, started at the beginning of last century to help jobless World War One veterans to scrape a living with allotments or big gardens.

Now food trends have come full circle putting Country Markets ahead of the game because they have kept to the ethos of fresh, home-grown food they started with almost 100 years ago.

The only rule for producers who want to join the cooperative is that everything they sell must be their own, including any ingredients used in cooking, baking or preserving. They take a commission on everything they sell.

Buying food at country markets is a personal experience. Volunteers know exactly who has made what and where it comes from: Mr Richard’s chard, Mrs Lauritzin’s heather honey, free-range eggs from Mrs Price’s barn. They all live nearby.

“Producers don’t travel from more than a 20-mile radius and most of them are a lot more local than that,” confirms Country Markets Chairman, Gillian Hughes-Jones.

Not many producers can afford to pay the Soil Association to be certified organic and there are no explicit rules on pesticides and fertilisers either. But eggs and meat must be free-range.

Most join the cooperative for social rather than financial reasons so there isn’t such an imperative to uses sprays. Sometimes pest solutions can be novel. Mr Renouf, Chichester’s tomato producer, stays pest-free by using bees that live on aphids.

That’s the beauty of Country Markets believes Mrs Hughes-Jones: “You can get things you wouldn’t get otherwise. One of our directors has a quince tree and another grows alpine strawberries. You wouldn’t get these things in a supermarket.”

There are no restrictions on what members can sell at Country Markets, and they can be very regionally diverse. Many markets sell meat and dairy products and in some places like North Wales you can find freshly-caught crab and lobster.

Chichester doesn’t sell any meat but three miles away at Emsworth Country Market you can buy sausages, beef, lamb, pork and venison animals reared locally by Sussex farmers, the Dridges.

The jams, cakes and quiches are pretty good, too. Mrs Holford makes over a ton of preserves every year in six pressure cookers in her kitchen. The delicious evidence of her labour is lined up on the stall’s shelves - Gooseberry, Gooseberry and Elderflower, Blackberry and Apple, Apricot, Gooseberry and Strawberry, Greengage, Damson, Tasty Plum. There are 15 marmalades and the same again in chutney.

This is lovingly produced, fresh, food with minimal preservatives and pesticides. Personal care is taken with everything that is sold – the standards are higher than with a commercial product. They have been doing the same thing for a long time and not even for the money. “I don’t know if anybody would ever earn enough to make a living doing markets,” says Mrs Teakle, who runs Emsworth market. So why do they do it? “To hear people coming back asking for “Mrs Holford’s Seville marmalade, please”,” says Valerie. “It’s very satisfying.”

To find your nearest country market visit: www.country-markets.co.uk

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