Local Food that you can trust...
At Huntstile Farm we are passionate about food and we try and produce as much of what we like to eat as possible...and we do it organically. This means we grow food in tune with the environment. We don't use artificial pesticides, we rotate crops, we don't force anything, its a more natural way of growing and it all starts with the soil: healthy soil = healthy crops = healthy people.
What you eat really matters to us, the quality, the flavour - its all important.
Our motto is: Love Your Food... we do!
Cooking is a passion with all of us at Huntstile and there is nothing like having the very freshest ingredients to hand. We are extremely fortunate to have David, Rosie, Helen & John all helping and looking after our veg plots and growing the most amazing vegetables. Paul, our long term Wwoofer, tends our livestock producing delicious pork, and homemade sausages, and our chickens lay the most delicious eggs that ever were (yes, we're biased!).
Our hedgerows are stuffed full of juicy blackberries and cob nuts, the walnut tree usually produces a hefty harvest too. To top it off our neighbours to the south raise organic lamb and beef, Steve (who runs Seafoods in Burnham) sells the finest crabs from Brixham and knows the best catch of the day and where to get it, and Richard Plowright (Stowey Rocks Farm up the road) is a sensational local organic vegetable producer who delivers anything extra that we need each week. There is also Dykes Farm organic dairy who sell delicious unpasteurised milk from a little shed on the farm in Stoke St Gregory.
We accept reservations for private dinner bookings - please contact Lizzie for more information. Bookings must be made in advance.
Dairy cows
Huntstile has its own micro-dairy and we love producing our own milk, butter and cream. Our beautiful, gentle cows Daisy, Buttercup and Marigold are pedigree Dairy Short Horns and we milk them once a day in the mornings.We also have Tweeny, a pedigree Jersey lady, and her calf Babybella. All our cows are 100% pasture fed, which means they graze on pasture throughout the year and have extra snacks of hay and silage whenever they want to.
We use a milking machine for the cows. We could milk them by hand of course however this way is hygenic and doesn’t take much time at all, which enables us to bottle and cool the milk quickly and efficiently.
Chickens
We have a small flock of organic laying chickens in the paddock, there are about 45 made up of a few Cuckoo Marans (speckledy fat hens who lay dark brown speckledy eggs), some Black Rocks (black feathers with green shine, ginger neck & heads – a Rhode Island cross, lays pale shelled eggs) and lots of Light Sussex(white fat hens with grey flecking around neck & wing area, lay creamy/light brown eggs). We also have some Sasso table birds....but they are just pets.
They live in the chicken house next to the garden at the moment, although we move them from field to field, and we strip graze them in the paddock using the tried & tested Balfour method.
All our chickens are happy FREE-RANGERS! …therefore it stands to reason they lay Good Eggs!