Welcome to Merrybower Homestead

We are what we like to call a “Tinyholding” in South Derbyshire. We have lived here since 2007 and have created our homestead from bare earth, literally. We have surrounded ourselves with edible hedgerows, actively encourage wildlife and do our best to live alongside everything else here. We grow our own food, and produce fruit for sale locally. It’s a balancing act, but then life always is!

Below you can learn more about our offerings, and a bit about us. For the ongoing story you can always visit the About Us page. Enjoy your stay.

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Our offerings

Garden Gate Sales

That’s it folks! We have nothing for sale from this season’s growing – all of our fruit is off the trees and the veggie patch is being tucked up for winter. Thank you to everyone who has passed by to buy fruit from us over this crazy year!

Latest about

allotment

Diggin’ Dirt

The sun is out, the sky is blue, there’s not a cloud, to spoil the view, and I’m diggin’… diggin’ in the dirt. Today I’ve mostly been planting the main crop spuds, so called because they’re the ‘main’ crop – the crop we’ll be eating for the majority of the year and over winter. We […]

orchard

Wild Flower Experiment #1 – Killing the Grass

Welcome to our wild flower experiment, a trial looking to introduce wild flowers to the orchard. There are several reasons for this – one is to encourage pollinators to the orchard, and another is to cut down on the amount of grass cutting needed. When we sowed grass, before the orchard was started, we thought […]

animals

Freedom!!

What a winter for the chooks! With the avian flu pandemic they were only allowed out of their covered runs this April, several months literally cooped up. This is how is should be, them running free below the orchard, scratching up over-wintered bugs, fertilising the ground and providing us with fresh eggs, in exchange for […]

food & drink

2019 Cider No.2

With all the kerfuffle over the confounded Covid-19 virus, cider bottling was put to the bottom of the ‘to-do’ list. Before it all kicked off, we’d managed to bottle two ferementers – No.4, a small 30 litre fermenter, and No.1, one of the new Speidel 60 litre fermenters. Today we finally got round to No.2 […]