We have made a few changes in Middle Stolford over the Winter intended to make your stay even more fun and interesting. The ever evolving clay oven area now has a stove to keep out the chill on cool evenings, and this has already proved a popular addition. For those who have visited before, you will remember …
Just a few pictures we have taken while walking about the place over the winter, and two late entrants for last summer that never made the cut in earlier blogs. Some of them were taken in January after a light dusting of snow, and one of them is a shot of our meadow hay being …
Only one contestant this year, Izzie the farm dog. In this video the sheep round up the dog, which still sort of worked because the dog always comes back to Ben anyway. Whilst we realise that Izzie is not actually a sheep dog, the lambs in particular are very fond of her, and seem to …
We separated the boys from the girls when we bought the yearlings in at the end of last summer, which immediately gave us a housing problem. We do have plans for a large new cattle barn, but this year we had to knock up a pen for the steers. As you will see from the …
We have already done some nice sunset pictures, so I thought we’d share with people a lovely April sunrise on a frosty Sunday morning. The bulling heifers are the only cattle out at the moment, but the sheep and their lambs have been out since late March, and although they do have a field shelter …
We thought we would share with you a selection of Stolford Sunsets. The most dramatic are our ‘forest fire’ sunsets which we promise you are exactly as taken by one of our i-Phones. The others are just pretty sunsets, and we are lucky to get these regularly here at Stolford.
In March we bought a dozen point of lay chickens from an organic farm just outside Exeter and housed them in our luxury chicken pad in Middle Barn field. We built them what we hope is a fox and polecat proof run, with a two meter high enclosure and a 400 square meter day paddock …
In August 2021 we bought our second batch of Friesian cross Herefords, once again nine heifers and seven steers. At a glance you can tell that not all their mum’s were Friesian, with at least one Norwegian Red and a possible Fleckvieh mother in the mix. Anyway, they’ve settled in well and we’ll probably turn …
We puzzled ourselves for a while trying to think of an environmentally sound way of setting up raised beds in our kitchen garden. We didn’t want to use timber because it’s got a lot of delivery miles on it and it rots quickly these days. We also looked at sleepers made of recycled plastic but …
When we bought the farm we had no water in any of the fields by Syndercombe Lane, or in the fields alongside the River Tone. This made grassland management problematic, because we had to ‘ranch’ about 120 acres in order to provide livestock with water from our own streams. So we got a water diviner …
