We are busily gearing up: getting trails mown and pruned, benches in place, signs up etc to welcome visitors to the Estate for the first time in over 18 months on Sunday 4th July.
You can come along between 10am and 4pm to walk, cycle or even run around the estate or you can just relax and take in the scenery of our usually private parkland, woods and lakes. There is a £3.00 car parking fee payable either on line in advance or on the gate.
Deer safari’s are running throughout the day and are being run in line with current COVID guidelines. As such, pre-booking is essential, a few spaces are available on the safaris and they can be booked here.
Refreshments will be available from Nice n Toastie horse box catering on site here too.
We are so excited to be able to open up again and to have visitors back to the estate. We’ll see you on Sunday.
Open Camping Weekend
If you can’t make it on the 4th July or would love to come along and spend more time here, our Open Camping Weekend takes place between 16th and 18th July. We are inviting you to come and stay for the weekend in your tent, caravan or motorhome.
Tents and caravans are welcome in the grassy glade of the arboretum and there is plenty of hard standing in the woodland parking area too. The site doesn’t have electric hook ups but running water and fully flushing toilets are on site and a waste disposal facility is available.
You are welcome to pitch up from 4pm-7pm on Friday afternoon until Sunday at 4pm to enjoy the whole estate at your leisure. Deer Safaris will also be available to campers and there’s even some evening entertainment at the Walled Garden on Saturday night. To find out more and to secure your pitch, please click here.
There are still a few pitches available so we encourage you to book as soon as possible as they are selling out quickly.
Mud, Sweat & Gears
We are delighted to host, (& for the first time in Lincolnshire!), Mud, Sweat & Gears on Sunday 29th August, perfect for all avid mountain bikers. Not only is the event taking place on Sunday but on site camping is also available over the weekend. You can find out more details and book a place in the event or camping on the Mud, Sweat and Gears website here.
Our Imperial and Royal venison boxes are available to order now for delivery next week from 8th July. So you can try something different on the barbeque as well as stocking up the freezer!
Our boxes contain a variety of cuts of our home reared, premium quality, delicious venison.
If you live over 30 miles away we will post your fresh venison box – for this we charge £10 for post and packaging which is added to your order at checkout.
To place your order please click here.
As well as our venison, local Stourton Honey is now also available to order on our website. The honey is produced by Billinghay Bees from their 12 hives located on our estate. The 360,000+ bees spend their time feasting on the wild flowers and crop pollen and nectar around the fields and woodland, providing important pollination for plant survival as well as creating delicious honey that we can now share with you.
You can find it here on our site and it can be added to your venison or landscaping products order for home delivery.
This month we have welcomed two happy couples and their nearest and dearest to the estate for their wedding celebrations. Both weddings were entirely unique and seeing couples celebrate in their own way is always such a joy! We have also hosted a private party for a family-get-together meeting up for the first time in almost 2 years, the children in particular really enjoyed the freedom of playing garden games in the arboretum as well as a private deer safari on the tractor and trailer. It really has been wonderful to see people enjoying themselves again.
If you’d like to find out more about what we can offer to help you plan a bespoke rustic woodland celebration here then please don’t hesitate to visit the venue section of our website or to get in touch with us.
Since the last blog was written we have been busy with the sprayer applying fungicides and nutrients to our crops. Hitting the correct application timings for crop growth stages has been tricky at times this year, some long hours have been required to stay on target!
Now we are largely caught up with our arable crops, as mentioned in the previous blog we will be working to prepare for (the fast approaching) harvest. As well as readying the buildings and machinery for the busy time ahead, this is a good opportunity for us to take a break from work. The farm team will be having a bit of time off to ‘recharge the batteries’ before we set about the next challenge.
Other upcoming jobs include a degree of estate maintenance; ensuring all of our roadways are in good condition, mowing field gateways to ensure good visibility for the grain carts. Health and safety is also firmly in our minds at this time of year. While it is an incredibly important part of our thinking here, with seasonal staff arriving and with the long hours of harvest looming it is also important that we bring it to the forefront of our minds. Agriculture has a very poor health and safety record, it is high time attitudes were changed, accidents can and do happen all too frequently.
That’s all for now, hopefully by the time the next blog comes around we may have made a start on the winter barley over at Baumber Park, let’s hope we don’t get too many thunderstorms in the meantime as it is still stood up nicely!!
All of our deer have now calved and the parkland is full of little calves, running with the herd. It’s such a lovely sight to see.
In other news Dotty, our hand reared deer calf is continuing to thrive….in our garden. She is proving to be quite a character. Not only does she now head butt the window when it’s time for a bottle feed but has started to try to barge into the house with us whenever the back door is opened. We now cannot put any sheets on the washing line as these are proving to be a delicious snack and we’ve all but given up on having any flowers in the garden. These small issues not withstanding she is very much part of family life now and we love her very much!
Dotty is now having fewer but larger milk feeds throughout the day and has started to graze, so no need for a lawn mower! We add selenium to her bottle feeds to ensure that she is getting the same mix of nutrients that she would naturally be getting from her mother. She is already substantially bigger than the other calves out in the parkland, so we can’t be doing much wrong! Hopefully her size will work to her advantage as we introduce her into the main herd. We will do this once the other calves have weaned from their mothers and Dotty herself no longer needs as many milk feeds, this will be later in the summer. We hope that she becomes one of our breeding herd of hinds and enjoys a long and happy life with us.
In our last blog we discussed our carbon footprint and how we are working to increase efficiency or energy usage across the estate.
We have just completed an upgrade of our biomass boiler to both improve its performance and also allow surplus heat to be piped across the yard to our farm offices. Now waste timber can be used to keep us toasty over the winter months!
But before then we will see you hopefully see you soon…
Antony and Helen
Reared here on the farm, professionally butchered & packaged for us by local butchers and labelled here, we deliver direct to your door in our veni-van across Lincolnshire, freshly frozen venison is also available for delivery nationwide!
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