• One Step at a Time - A Tiny Derbyshire Smallholding

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.

Our offerings

Heirloom Fruit

Try fruit from the past

Poultry Boarding

A perfect chicken break

Garden Gate Sales

Spare produce for sale

Gifts for Chickens…

...and chicken slaves

Other items of interest

Animals

We all live here

Tote Bags

Handmade Tote Bags

Recipes

Some ideas

Wildlife

Old and new friends

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!

What’s available now?

Latest about

allotment

Busy Sunday

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The spring weather continues to be glorious, and as the earth warms up, more seeds can be sown and indoor growers transplanted to outdoors. Today we began with the task of potting on. Vegetable growing is a continuous production line; plants needing a long growing season, such as aubergine, begin inside in a warm place […]

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orchard

2018 Cider No.2 Pressing Day

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The Picking It all started out with a sunny day, as it usually does. Unless it’s raining, which hasn’t been that often this year, really. Cider No.2 has typically been a “pick the apples mid October, press them end of October” thing. This year the condensed but intense growing period in the summer has forced the […]

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animals

Hoglets!

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We’ve reasonable knowledge about hedgehogs over 300 g, and have overwintered some of these prickly darlings in our purpose-built animal room. But hoglets?! A passerby saw a hoglet outside the house, knocked on the door … a quick search and we found 4 more abandoned hoglets. We put them in a carrier with a heat […]

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food & drink

2019 Cider No.2

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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 […]

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