The farm house is a little different since we took over too. We were terrified of taking over the beautiful listed house, complete with a flock of chickens roaming free and wild cats living under the granary. It's only marginally less busy now, having replaced the chickens and cats with our two dogs and two grown-up children, who when they're not travelling and working help out on the farm and make nearly as much noise as the cats.  The kitchen's always busy with people coming and going, drinking tea, or with Sarah preparing fresh herbs for our sausages, or just cooking the sausages for hungry hoards. We're really pleased with our new quarterly food and craft markets, we held the first one last Autumn and had a fantastic turn out of people and businesses. John was so busy preparing for it that he had his jumper on back-to-front! We were really into the swing of it by the Christmas market and we can't wait for the next one in the spring followed by the Farm Fest in the summer with live music and lots more local businesses joining in.

The nice thing about being a fairly small farm is that we have complete control over what we do. Ethics, environment and quality are extremely important to us. Everything apart from the slaughter of our animals is done here, John takes the animals to slaughter locally so there's less stress for them, but all the jobs are done at the farm from rearing calves, feeding, breeding and packing to butchering. There's never been any chemicals used on the soil here, we keep calves with their mothers, and our Gloucester Old Spot cross Saddleback pigs are grown slowly, so that they can enjoy a diet supplemented with all sorts of kitchen scraps or fallen apples from our ancient orchards, tossed in by visiting children!

For more information on our meat, farm and methods please click on the other links or pop by the Farm Shop on a Saturday morning. If you're lucky you might even get a cup of tea!

Sarah and John