December 2021 at Stourton

Event round-up: Christmas Open Day

On Saturday 4^th December we held our winter open day.  Under the new shelter of the roundhouse visitors came to choose or pick up their pre-ordered trees, purchase venison to stock up the freezer and enjoy festive refreshments from The Lunch Wagen. We also ran festive deer safaris and around 20 of the deer calves born this summer were getting acclimatized to their new surroundings in the roundhouse for our visitors to see. They generally behaved very well!  Despite the slightly grotty weather we were delighted to see some friendly faces join us for an hour or two.

As ever, a huge thank you to all who attended, well done to the The Lunch Wagen keeping up with demand for hot chocolates and to our fabulous Stourton team who helped to set up and attended on the day to ensure everything ran smoothly. We look forward to holding many more open days from late spring time in the New Year.  Keep your eyes peeled for news about these next year.

Trees, Venison and Logs – Last orders please!

Christmas Trees: We have a few beautiful Nordmann Fir trees left following our open day. If you’d like to come and choose or collect your tree (which you can pre-order online) you can come to the barn at the farm yard (LN9 5BP) between 10am – 12pm on Saturday (11^th) and Sunday (12^th) December. We highly recommend pre-ordering to avoid disappointment or a wasted trip.

Venison: It is lovely to enjoy venison over the festive season and into the New Year, our fresh venison boxes are already SOLD OUT for December delivery and will be shipped to customers from Thursday 16^th December.

If you’d prefer to ‘click and collect’ from our selection of frozen venison our veni-van will be stationed down Clays Lane at the A158 entrance on Friday 17^th December 11-2 from which you can collect your order. Please place your orders online prior to coming to see us.

If you wish to place an order for frozen venison for home delivery (free within 20 miles by road of the farm postcode) our last delivery date is 22^nd December and we won’t be making any further deliveries until Thursday 6^th January.

Logs: Our last order date for logs is Friday 17^th December with spaces already filling up fast for our last delivery date  on 22^nd December.

Our office and farm staff are very ready to take a well deserved break so we will be closed throughout the festive season from 23^rd December – 6^th January.

On the Farm

As we head towards Christmas on the arable farm thoughts turn towards the team having a little well-earned time off with family.

With two pretty significant storms in quick succession we have been extremely fortunate to escape any major damage. We can cope with an odd wet patch showing itself as the land reaches field capacity (full saturation point!).

Crops are generally looking well heading into the winter. Winter oilseed rape crops are a little patchier than I would like but the winter barley and winter wheats are pleasing across the board. Our winter beans have largely all emerged, and we should be seeing them all clearly in rows within the next ten day, a huge improvement on last year which saw one field emerging towards the end of January having been sown in the first week of November!!

We are hoping to lift another 10ha approximately of sugar beet before we finish for Christmas which will be stored on our ‘pad’ until delivery into the factory is possible.

I will take this opportunity to again thank every member of our team for their hard work this year.

Deer Diary

With the dip in temperatures and threat of another storm the deer calves have been road testing the new roundhouse for their winter quarters and it looks like they are settling in nicely. The roundhouse is designed to protect them from the worst of the weather whilst maintaining a lovely calm environment within the natural shelter of the woodland.   Before the calves go into the roundhouse they are given a copper bolus, wormer and a unique tag identifier before going to enjoy the new roundhouse’s facilities over the winter months.

Finally we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for continuing to support us through what has been one of the toughest of years.  From all of the team here, we hope that you and your loved ones have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Antony and Helen