If you’ve not yet tried these amazing fire briquettes made from willow now is the time! These briquettes kick out heat and are great to get your room warm quickly – perfect for this time of year as the nights are drawing in.
For a limited period we are running a price reduction on packs of Willoglow briquettes reduced from £9.50 to £8.50 per pack. You can add just one pack to try to any other bagged product order (such as kiln dried logs).*
*Minimum order of 5 packs if ordered on their own.
Help with Planning your Wedding at Stourton Woods…
Holding your wedding at Stourton Woods is an experience that you and your guests will never forget. With the safari tent sheltered by the woodland and overlooking the deer park and lakes it is a venue like no other. All weddings here are entirely bespoke so you literally can bring your ideas and make the day of your dreams one to remember for all the right reasons!
Of course, planning your special day can be great fun, however we recognise there is a lot to consider and making sure everything runs just as you expect is no mean feat. To help every couple navigate their wedding journey at Stourton we are delighted to be working with Amy Lauren Weddings. Amy and her team are based at Louth and you can find out more about what they do here. Amy has a wealth of experience of planning weddings, (she is currently a regional finalist in the 2025 Wedding Industry Awards for Wedding Planning, good luck Amy!). She is also highly organised, loves bespoke marquee weddings and is super friendly. Amy visited us here recently and fell in love with the venue – even in the rain!
After booking your wedding here Amy will be on hand to ensure that everything runs smoothly in the lead up to your wedding and on the day itself, she is a great asset to the team here and we are looking forward to working with her.
We started early for our Open Day on 6th October to welcome members of the Horncastle Running Group eager to start their Sunday following the 5km route around the estate – it was great to see such a diverse group of runners, walkers, children & dogs getting active and taking in the beauty of the trail! We have had some great feedback from this event and hope to run another one next summer.
Then from mid-morning we opened the gates to many more visitors coming along to enjoy the guided farm safaris on the tractor & trailer, to stock up on venison and enjoy delicious refreshments from the nomad coffee company!
We are now scoping out and planning an exciting programme of events which will start in early May 2025 – please follow us on social media or share this monthly newsletter with your friends to keep up to date.
Venison
We have great selection of all cuts in stock in now, please email contact@stourtonestates.co.uk for details and Tina will put together your order for collection from the farm by arrangement or delivery with any logs or landscaping product order. Also – if you’d like a particular cut or venison joint over the festive season please get in touch ASAP so that we can arrange for this to be supplied to you in plenty of time ahead of Christmas.
We’re excited to be exhibiting VERY LOCALLY at the Walled Garden Baumber on Sunday 10th Nov for their first Food & Drink Fayre. We will have a full range of venison available and will be sharing more on how we rear this incredibly sustainable and healthy meat when we give a talk at this event and we will share just how versatile this top quality meat is to cook!
Did you know… some of the veni-fits of eating farmed venison?
Whilst the health benefits of eating venison are now well recognised; being low in fat, high in protein & iron and packed full of B vitamins, there can be a distinct difference in flavour between farmed and wild venison. The flavour of wild venison can vary dramatically, you may not know the species, age or sex of the animal – or even how old it is and definitely not what it has been eating either! Our farmed venison is reared and cared for daily in surroundings giving the herds the highest animal welfare standards. Their main diet of parkland grass is supplemented by herb rich forage grown on the farm and we ensure they are moved regularly onto fresh pasture and giving them ‘new’ enclosures to explore! Of course, we are quality assured and the way we care for the animals throughout their life prior to being culled at the optimum time means the animals are not in the least bit stressed prior to being prepared for sale. It also means that we are able to offer a consistently high-quality product which is both tender, flavoursome – and healthy!
Christmas Trees – available to order soon!
As in previous years we will be getting a beautiful selection of freshly cut Nordmann Fir trees ready to be delivered to your door. These premium trees have the added advantage that they hold their needles throughout the festive season and beyond! Pruned and tended throughout their growing season, they have a lovely conical shape.
Once these are available to order we will let you know! Keep an eye out on our Facebook and Instagram!
On the Farm
We are absolutely delighted to welcome David Bristow who has joined as our new Farm Manager. David has really hit the ground running in October, mainly concentrating on drilling our winter crops, he is keen to drive forward our transition to regenerative farming too – more from him below…
‘October has been a busy month on the farm, drilling, loading grain lorries and sugar beet lifting have been the main activities. We have had 67mm of rain spread quite evenly throughout the month, this has meant a bit of a stop start autumn drilling campaign. However as at 31st October we only have 50ha of winter wheat left to drill, just over half of which is after sugar beet so with a decent weather forecast showing a dry spell I am confident we will get this competed in the first few days of November.
We have used all 3 cereal drills on farm this autumn! The new avatar (our direct drill) has done a great job on some of the drier land but as the month progressed and land became wetter we moved onto using the Sumo DTS which is a strip till drill, this means it loosens only a strip of soil where the seeds will be planted and leaves the rest of the land undisturbed, a bit of a halfway house if you will between direct drilling and full cultivation. Another drill which we’ve used is a KRM tine drill which has the ability to drill if the soil is wetter still as it doesn’t pack the soil down around the seed, it also has plenty of clearance for soil and remaining vegetation to pass through it. A versatile approach is always required with the land here but as we gradually move to a less intensive cultivation approach the soil will get better conditioned and become easier to drill into even if ground conditions are more marginal. We will continue to monitor crops for slug damage that may occur.
As part of our move to regenerative farming we have also drilled beans alongside the wheat as a companion crop, this will provide some nitrogen to the wheat crop (as beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil), diversity in root structures and a flower in the spring which will provide nectar for insects, all of which improve soil health and biodiversity in the long run.
As you can tell, there is plenty going on the farm & I’d like to thank all the team at Stourton for such a warm welcome and a seamless transition. If you read this & have any questions or subjects you would like me to cover in a future farming update please drop me an email at david.bristow@stourtonestates.co.uk and I will cover it another month!’’
Deer Diary
We have now weaned the calves from the Hinds and given them all a copper bolus to keep them healthy through the winter months, this is particularly important after they have been weaned. We’ve also started to give them herb rich silage to supplement the parkland grass, although the warm and wet weather has certainly maintained good growth into the autumn. Neve has been out feeding the deer early morning and checking on them – who are understandably friendly when they see her… or is it that she is bringing them their breakfast?!
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!