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Tales from the Green Valley was the Original Farm series featuring Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn along with Chloe Spencer and Stuart Peachey.
Neither Chloe nor Stuart appeared in the subsequent series. Chloe moved on to other things. But Stuart had been involved with the Green Valley farm reconstruction process from the beginning and that is where he remains to this day.
Bearing that in mind, it will come as no surprise that this series is primarily about the farm and an experiment in running it for a year as it would have been run in the past. So this series lacks some of the historical context that is more evident in the later series.
Following this series, the team went on to produce ‘A Tudor Feast at Christmas’ in much the same way that they produced Christmas specials for the later series. In this case, however, there is little link. The special covers the preparation and consumption of a feast at a grand Tudor manor house and makes no mention of farming.
Each half hour episode in the series covers one month. We begin, quite logically, in September. It is now that the fields must be ploughed to prepare the way for planting for the next year’s harvest. The boys set to work with the ploug and a pair of oxen while the girls demonstrate some of the domestic chores -
The line between the new year and the old is not entirely black and white. After ploughing the field, they move on to bring in apples from the orchard. Read more in my review of episode 1.
Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn are currently appearing on BBC2 in Tudor Monastery Farm. You can read reviews of the episodes and details of the locations here.