Our Produce

At Ashford Farm, all of our poultry is free range. Our turkeys (both bronze and white) come in from a British hatchery as day old chicks in June and are slow growing traditional breeds, often being around double the age of those reared intensively. The fact that they are allowed to mature slowly and have daily access to our fields below the beautiful Ashford Hangers, mean they grow into plump, rounded turkeys with a natural layer of fat, which makes for a flavoursome and tasty final product.

We try and give our turkeys as natural a life as possible so they wander in and out of the barn for food, (which is predominately milled from our own oats and wheat grown in nearby fields) during the day. If you walk down our lane you will see them out in the field but watch out as they can be perched on the fences (a form of turkey oneupmanship!) or found in our yard having a dust bath in the wood shavings!

When the time comes, our turkeys are slaughtered on farm by licensed slaughtermen so that stress is kept to an absolute minimum and, obviously, no travelling is involved. Our birds are dry plucked for a quality finish and hung for a minimum of 7 days to allow the flavour to develop. We provide our turkeys dressed and oven ready in individual boxes with giblets and cooking instructions included.

Thanksgiving, early bird or New Year birds are available!

At Ashford Farm, all of our poultry is free range. Our geese come in from a hatchery in Norfolk as day old goslings in April. Initially, they are kept under heat lamps in the barn but as soon as they “feather up” they have daily access to our fields below the Ashford Hangers, where you will see them wandering pecking at the grass or sunbathing, invariably as one large “gaggle”!

As well as the grass, the geese are fed on a diet predominately milled from our own wheat and oats, which we grow and harvest locally.

When the time comes, our geese are slaughtered on farm by licensed slaughtermen so that stress is kept to an absolute minimum and, obviously, no travelling is involved. Our birds are dry plucked for a quality finish and hung for a minimum of 7 days to allow the flavour to develop. We provide our geese dressed and oven ready in individual boxes with giblets.

Thanksgiving, early bird or New Year birds are available.

At Christmas time we are delighted to offer gammons from our outdoor reared pigs.  Our gammons are provided dry cured and uncooked, and we offer them on or off the bone and smoked or unsmoked.

Accompaniments

As part of our Christmas fayre, we offer chipolatas, sausages, sausagemeat and bacon (smoked and unsmoked, streaky and back)  Because these are produced from the same pigs as our gammons (which have to be cured for a month) our “extras” are provided frozen.  They are priced at £3 per packet or choose any selection of 4 for £10.    Sausages are packets of 8, chipolatas in packets of 16 and sausagemeat in tubes of 0.5 kg/1.1 lbs.

12 year old Henry started his duck enterprise with four ducks – one hatched (Quack Quack), one bought and two given to him by fellow farmer, Richard Jones. When the two ducks started laying this spring we thought it would be fun to hatch some of the eggs in the incubator. We didn’t realise quite how prolific they would be!!

It is amazing just how many eggs two ducks can lay over the course of a spring and summer and we’ve ended up with around 80 ducks, plus a few Indian Runners and Appleyards from eggs bought in for good measure!

Henry has wanted to be a farmer for the whole of his life and has always helped Simon with the cattle, sheep and turkeys, so it was just another step for him to look after his duck flock!

We will be keeping some of the ducks back for laying and hope to have duck eggs available for sale from the farm gate (along with our free range chicken eggs) in the spring. In the meantime, we will be selling some of Henry’s ducks in the shop at Christmas time – we anticipate they will weigh between 2.5 – 3 kg. Henry will be thrilled if you will support his budding business!