The Ashby family (sample) has grown fruit and vegetables on Hollow Lane since 1962. Three generations still work the fields, the shop and the boxes.
Grandad Tom came to Hollow Lane with a tractor, a cow and a field of potatoes (sample). Today we grow more than forty crops, run a farm shop in the old milking parlour and pack around two hundred veg boxes a week.
Nothing goes to a supermarket. What we cannot sell fresh goes into juice, chutney or the compost heap, and back onto the fields.
How a dairy farm became a fruit and vegetable farm (sample).
1962
Tom and Edith Ashby rent forty acres, six cows and a field of potatoes.
1979
Edith plants an acre of strawberries and sells them from a table at the gate.
1994
The cows go; the orchard and the raspberry canes go in, and the gate opens to pickers.
2012
The old milking parlour becomes the shop, with eggs, bread and honey from neighbours.
2021
Boxes start during a long winter and reach two hundred a week by the next summer.
A family of growers and a few neighbours who help at busy times (sample).
Fields and orchard (sample)
Veg boxes and deliveries (sample)
Strawberries, still (sample)
Farm shop (sample)
School visits (sample)
Tractors and everything that breaks (sample)
Sixty acres of heavy clay on the slope down to the brook (sample). The clay holds water through dry summers and grows sweet roots; it also means wellies from October to March.
Vegetable fields
38 acres
Orchard
9 acres, 22 varieties
Soft fruit
4 acres
Hedges, margins and the pond
9 acres
Figures (sample).
The farm shop is open six days a week and the pick-your-own fields from Wednesday to Sunday.