Copper pans and a week's produce on a stone-topped table

Four of us · one range · eleven growers

The kitchen

Unit 4 was a milking parlour until 1996 and still has the drains for it. We took it in 2011 with one second-hand range and a 40-litre pan, and the pan is the same one.

Batch 0420

25 Sep

48 blocks

19 left

Yard hatch

The copper and the week's fruit on the bench.

A gloved hand lifting a plant out of wet soil — Lifting a crown in the rain, Tolpuddle plot.

02 — Where it comes from

Eleven growers, and we pay them before the pan goes on.

Nobody here grows anything. Everything in the pan was grown by somebody within twenty miles who tells us a fortnight out roughly what is coming and on the morning exactly what came. We take the lot, including the bruised half, which is why there is apple butter.

We pay on the weight at the gate, in the week, at a price agreed in March and not renegotiated in September. Twice that has cost us money. Once it meant a grower kept a plum orchard that was going to be grubbed up.

Pennfield: Damson, greengage, plum · 6 miles · with us since 2012
Tolpuddle plot: Forced rhubarb, beans · 14 miles · since 2016
Shutes Farm: Discovery, Bramley, windfalls · 4 miles · since 2011
Eight others: Currants, quince, mulberry · all under 20 miles

Four people and who answers for which run

A bearded man chopping fruit at a table beside a window — Alun PreesStarted it. Does the setting, the ordering and the arguing with the water board.Alun Prees breaking down quince at the long table.Answers for 0420 · 48 blocks · 19 left

A young person with a tattooed forearm standing in a kitchen — Teo BranickBottling and the water bath. Joined 2021 from a cider press.Teo Branick, end of a bottling shift.0416 · 72 jars · 0 left

A woman working at a stove with two pans — Marthe ObreSecond pan, skimming, and every recipe that has salt in it.Marthe Obre skimming the second pan.0391 · 120 jars · 0 left

A woman in an apron standing in a bright workroom — Nessa DorrienThe hatch, the market stall and the yard book the counts come from.Nessa opening the hatch on a Saturday.0421 · 84 jars · 44 left

Every run any of them has signed off, in the ledger →

2011The apron: eleven years, two pockets gone.

Copper pans and moulds hung on an old kitchen wall

We are not a brand with a kitchen behind it. We are a kitchen with a label on the front.

Marthe Obre · the pan wall in the old dairy

A year, in four weeks that matter

The rest is washing up. These are the weeks that decide what the ledger says.

01

Late April · the blossom count

Alun walks the three orchards and writes a number in the back of the yard book. It has been wrong twice in fourteen years and both times it was wrong low.

One left on the tree after the pick.

02

A wooden crate of apples standing in a field

Second week of September · windfalls

Four days to sort 38 kg of bruised apples into sound and gone. About 60% comes through. It is the only week we take on casual help.

Windfalls crated at the field gate.

03

A pile of cut red rhubarb stalks with their leaves

Mid-January · the forcing shed

The kitchen is shut all January except for this. Three runs of forced rhubarb, cut and in the pan the same morning, then the doors close again until February.

Forced rhubarb trimmed for the pan.

04

Jars standing on a stone shelf in a dark cellar

First frost · the hold-back

Whatever is left of the autumn runs goes down to the cold store and comes back out in March at the same price. Seven jars of 0288 have been down there since 2023.

The cold store at Oathill. Runs held back from 0288.

A person cooking at a stove in a kitchen lit yellow

We take on one person a year, in July

Come and stand at the pan

No experience, no CV, no cover letter. Turn up on a Thursday, work a run, and if you are still there at four we will talk about it. Bring shoes you do not mind.

Say you are coming →

Batch 0412

14 Sep

96 jars

31 left

Farm shop

The evening boil, last run of the week.