Grandsons Leo and Ben check the rabbit-proof fence
Exmoor has always done countless shades of green pretty well and the setting of Higher Ranscombe Farm is no exception. It’s at the eastern end of the national park, tucked in under Grabbist Hill with Minehead over the other side.The steep sides of the combe are covered in mature trees. Facing the other way there’s a collage of fields, as though someone has been carefully gluing bits of material and card, and beyond these you can see the village of Timberscombe. Birdsong interrogates the silence. From a wall opposite the house a spring gushes out, the same one that supplies the house’s drinking water and waters the vegetable plot. You suspect it’s been like this for a long time.
“Whenever I come to this, I stick the spade in and reap the benefits of the hard work of centuries,” says Rob Reed, who was born in the house.The thatched house with its bulky cob walls first appears on a map of 1701 but it’s older than that. And there has always been a vegetable garden. The soil, sandy and loamy and free-draining, has the local reddish tinge but here in the vegetable garden the colour is more muted. Four hundred years of cows and their manure have done their copious business, and successive custodians of the plot have ensured that it is well dug in. Rob’s grandfather dug it before him and his own father could sometimes be heard digging at nine o’clock on a summer night, after a day’s work with his dairy herd.The supply of well-rotted manure has been constant, even though the dairy cattle have been replaced by beef, and with plenty of horses in the village you’re never that far from a manure pit or pile. The result is a micro-soil, peculiar to the farm.
Leggete l'articolo completo e molti altri in questo numero di
Kitchen Garden Magazine
Opzioni di acquisto di seguito
Se il problema è vostro,
Accesso per leggere subito l'articolo completo.
Singolo numero digitale
267 - December 2019
Questo numero e altri numeri arretrati non sono inclusi in un nuovo
abbonamento. Gli abbonamenti comprendono l'ultimo numero regolare e i nuovi numeri pubblicati durante l'abbonamento. Kitchen Garden Magazine
Abbonamento digitale annuale
€40,99
fatturati annualmente
Abbonamento digitale di 6 mesi
€21,99
fatturati due volte l'anno
Abbonamento digitale mensile
€4,99
fatturati mensilmente