“We have built our farm from scratch - ground up”

Our farm is located on the border of South Cheshire and North Shropshire between Nantwich and Whitchurch in the small village of BurleyDam.  It is a small family farm that we have painstakingly built  from the ground up over the last 20 years. In 2000 the farm was a bare piece of farm land with no building or house. The farm is just over 10.5 acres and the soil type is a medium / heavy loam.

After a lot of hard work and overcoming planning hurdles, we built a purpose built packaging building including a cold store, 2 large commercial polytunnels and a log chalet for our residence. Since 2012 we have been building our main house a border oak design and a full oak framed building, which we eventually moved into in 2019 after 7 years of painstaking perfection in building our dream.

Our passion is sustainability in every sense of the word and from our house to our very valuable soil we want to live as nature intended and leave it in a better state than we found it.  Our main aim is to keep the fertility high in the soil and looking after this precious resource. We give the soil valuable nutrients and farmyard manure every year and any crops that are not used are ploughed back in to build up soil fertility. 

“Our crops are grown from seed on our farm”

We grow over 80 different crops on our farm, including  salads (lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions, radish, cucumber) brassica (cauliflower, cabbage, calabrese) root vegetables (carrots, Parsnips, beetroot, potatoes) and a wide range of other vegetables. In addition we planted a 1 acre orchard over 15 years ago of apples, pears, plums. All of our vegetables and fruit are grown for taste and quality, and the English varieties of fruit including James Greave, Russett, Orleans Reinette, Blenheim Orange apples, Victoria Plum, Williams and Conference Pears and some of the best known old English varieties that have a superb taste and quality.

“Our livestock are characters”

Our farm has also a few key livestock, free range chickens for our well known eggs, a few ducks which are characters in their own right, Gloucester old spot pigs which eat all the scraps and waste veg which when fattened supply us with lovely tasty pork and sausages.  We also at Christmas have Bronze turkeys which spend their time roaming the orchards eating the fallen apples.

“Farming on organic principles including daughters who love their music! “

The farm is well equipped with machinery and we grow all our crops on organic principles and we try were we can to automate our production with mechanical weeders to prevent the need for herbicides (weed killers), mechanical planters which my daughters love to help with ( mainly because they can have their music blaring out from their itunes account ! (it is a good job we live in the middle of nowhere)!. This said there is still a fair amount of hand hoeing, hand weeding and planting all to help our little plants thrive. 

“Habitats on the farm - let nature play” 

Our farm is full of biodiversity and we have over the past 20 years planted hundreds of metres of new native hedgerows, built a pond, planted trees and orchards and allowed nature to thrive.

“the dawn chorus at 4am!”

What is lovely is the dawn chorus - an abundance of birds - starting their lovely songs at 4am!!! We have seen a large increase in wildlife and birds, ladybirds, lace wings, blackbirds and thrushes, hares, yellow hammer, woodpecker, buzzard to the occasional barn and little owl. We also see wild partridge, herons, fox and badgers (not always welcome i hasten to add due to our chickens)

We continue to grow and develop our farm and it continues to get more mature year on year and it is a privilege to be custodians of this little piece of heaven.

Vegetables are our roots and we live and breathe their beauty every single day.

We start planning in early January each year with the seed catalogues from a range of commercial and smaller artisan companies. 

Our main planning comes with first and foremost TASTE, but also for quality, seasonality and the best crops that perform on our farm. This knowledge has been built up over the past 2 decades and we always choose varieties that are firm favourites and classics that we know do well, but also like to try a few new crops that compliment the veterans.

‘We grow around 80 different crops and 250 varieties’

Plants are all grown from seed all planted by Jane and the girls (Iona especially likes to help with this operation and loves her flowers, sunflowers, hanging baskets, troughs) which she painstakingly loves and cares for every year. The problem is you can’t eat these!!! however they make the place look lovely and the art of growing is an essential tool for youngsters and they understand the seasons, the growing, the nutrition and the pests - blimey caterpillars, ladybird collecting is a real pastime. 

Seeds are grown in module trays in our polytunnels and left to grow for about 6 weeks depending on the crop. We grow around 80 different crops and around 250 varieties to ensure that we have sufficient supplies of fresh vegetables throughout the year.  It mostly goes to plan however when we have periods of very wet weather or periods of drought and planting can’t take place, then we have unfortunately some inevitable gluts, some which go to waste, well not waste - pig fodder!.

After plants come from the polytunnels, they are left outside in a hardening area to ensure they become accustomed to the outdoors before we plant them out in the fields. Crops such as cauliflower, calabrese, cabbage, leeks, lettuce, sprouts, green, red, black kale, romanesco, pumpkin, squash to name a few all start their lives like this.

Other crops such as potatoes, carrots, parsnips are planted direct into the soil once soil temperatures start to warm up in spring, usual planting around April depending on season. Crops such as Tomatoes, Cucumber, Pak Choi, Beetroot are grown in the polytunnels.

Once crops are planted then the fun starts!.

WEEDS, PESTS, DISEASES, watering, keeping birds off, all need to be controlled some way. We use a range of organic methods of controls for these, starting with selecting the correct variety to ensure they are resistant to certain ailments, however the weeds keep growing and these are hand weeded, inter row cultivator with the tractor or steerage hoes.

Once crops reach maturity, they are then harvested at the correct time - most of the vegetables are harvested the day they arrive on your doorstep for maximum freshness. Some crops such as maincrop potatoes are harvested and stored in our temperature controlled building to ensure they maintain their freshness throughout the winter.

It is then over to you for the most important piece of the jigsaw, preparation and eating it!.

Enjoy. !