Our Farm and Market Garden
Our market garden is a part of Spindlebrook Farm, which is made up of a diverse mixture of habitats, including a brook, a naturally regenerated woodland, 5 large ponds, streams, meadows and ancient elm hedgerows. It's an oasis of wildlife - something we are extremely keen to maintain and encourage.
We don't raise animals for meat but do have a rare breed flock of sheep to help with the conservation management of the flower rich meadows, and we also have ducks, dairy goats and chickens.
We’re on the outskirts of the picturesque heritage market town of Modbury, in the South Hams area of South Devon, which is only a few miles from the beautiful South Devon coast and magical Dartmoor.
Leo, Hen and Elliott purchased the farm in 2013 and whilst exploring the woods down by the brook, we found a solitary spindle tree (one of our favourites), and the name Spindlebrook Farm was born.
The market garden area was a plant nursery 20 years ago and includes 6 large polytunnels. Over the past 15 years these tunnels had become so derelict that trees were growing through the plastic. We began the exciting, if a little laborious, process of renovating them in the winter and spring of 2013/4.
The previous owners just didn't come back to work one day, leaving thousands of plastic pots and bits of nursery kit to gradually become buried in brambles and willow trees. So we're not just repairing frames and re-skinning them, we're also working our way through the piles of stuff to see what we can re-use and what we can recycle. We will never need to buy a pot, that's for sure!
Here we are: Hen with a big juicy beetleaf root, and Elliott with his garlic and Leo in his workshop
The southern tip of Dartmoor from Spindlebrook Farm