The Farm
The farm’s eight acres is a busy and diverse mosaic of south facing sloping fields, meadows and mixed age pine and broadleaf woodland.
In areas of open field, vegetable gardens, berry plots, polytunnels and tree nurseries make use of the sunny clearings, growing food for our family and returning surplus into the local community.
Multilayered food forests full of fruits, nuts, berries and herbs expand alongside the farms woodland edge and inhabit steep or undulating areas of the farm, leaving the larger and more accessible areas to grow multi-species silvopastoral orchards.
Our livestock rotationally graze between the hedgerows of mixed fruit and nut tress, with our house cows providing the farms dairy needs, our geese spreading their fertility throughout the grazing and our chickens following behind converting their varied forage into flavourful eggs.
Boundaries are edged with windbreak hedges and pockets of wood fuel coppice that feed our home fires and cook stoves, with pollard fodder trees that feed our ruminants as fresh browse in the summer or dried and bundled as tree hay for when the winter is here.
Farm tracks, laneways and paths link our house to gardens and our livestock shelters to grazing and woodland. Brash hedges - carefully piled walls of dead wood held together with stakes and woven willow - function as boundaries to the lanes, helping lead ruminants to their grazings whilst keeping them moving on and away from tender fruit trees or complex plantings of food forest where only the poultry are encouraged to forage and range.
Water is held on the farm in ponds and ditches with overflow water led away gently via drainage ditches, flowing through orchards and intersecting pathways, before filling other ponds or seeping back into the landscape.
Beautiful old stone walls and ruined farm buildings from bygone days peer out from behind ferns and self seeded thickets of gooseberry, currants and raspberries that provide fantastic wildlife habitat and thought provoking insight into the farming life that was here long before us.
And then of course there is the farmhouse, where most of the produce grown on the farm ends up, plans are made and many cups of tea are drunk around the kitchen stove.
Learn more about the history of the land and farm here.