Nothing – not a scrap – is wasted on Trill Farm. Vegetable and fruit scraps from the kitchen go into the giant compost heaps, as do the scrapings from the farm’s barns and the piles of compressed herbs used for the soap and beauty products. The water comes from two springs on the farm and a bore-hole, and is returned to the springs purified in a Bio-Bubble. Much of the farm’s energy for heating and hot water comes from solar panels, a small wind turbine, or is ground-sourced. Even the abundant weeds – the cleavers and the plantain, the nettles, the elderflowers and the hawthorn blossoms – find their way into teas, or healthy green salads or soaps and simple salves and balms. Twigs and branches from the many trees fuel the farm’s wood-burning stoves, the Douglas firs yield an essential oil distilled for soap-making, and chunks from the oak-trees end up as small beautifully crafted chopping boards.
Trill Farm is not, however, just a successful exercise in going green. Its founder, Romy Fraser, who bought this beautiful 300-acre Devon farm in 2008, has a broader, richer vision which grew out of her first hugely successful enterprise, Neal’s Yard Remedies. In the original Covent Garden shop, opened in 1981, Fraser wanted to help people look after their health in a natural way, rather than be totally reliant on the medical profession, and the shop filled up with homeopathic medicines, herbs in dried form or tinctures, essential oils. But by the time she and her staff were partying at the Chelsea Physic Garden to celebrate 15 years of growing success, Fraser was worrying.
“I was concerned that people were coming into the shops and buying a bag of comfrey tea or a bottle of lavender oil and just thinking it was going to work for them without really understanding the context of herbal medicine or natural health. So we started running courses in natural medicine.”
“Then I thought, there’s more to this: we need to teach people how to live so that they can be more resilient in a natural way, without resorting to herbs or whatever. It was at this point that I found Daphne Lambert, award-winning chef, nutritionist and awe-inspiring teacher. We worked together for some years to develop the living nutrition courses, and when I bought Trill Farm I invited Daphne to come here and help us demonstrate the connection between land, food, health and vitality.”
Trill Farm itself exists to make that connection. Since 2008 it has developed into a series of successful enterprises, run as independent businesses but still operating in close partnership with Romy and her staff. A couple who live on the farm with their children run the big vegetable gardens and supply all the vegetables and most of the fruit to the Trill kitchen, as well as marketing their produce to local restaurants. Another tenant rents the grazing, looking after the Ruby Red and Aberdeen Angus cattle, and the herd of Gotland sheep with their wonderful blue-grey fleece, which is woven into thick rugs and blankets for the Trill Farm shop.
Joe Haigh is in charge of making the soaps and other natural products - body balms and facial oils – using herbs and essential oils produced on the farm. Tall weather-beaten Noel Lakin keeps seven hives of his bees on the farm, supplying the kitchen and the shop with thick rich honey. And a year-round supply of “Wwoofers” – young volunteers, many of them from overseas, recruited through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms organisation, who in exchange for food and accommodation stay for a month to look after the orchards, the chickens and the big herb gardens as well as helping out on the farm, the kitchen or wherever they are needed.
It is financially self-supporting, like many small farms championing diversity, in a myriad of ways. Trill provides accommodation in a guest house, host events, sell from the shop (and bulk lamb and barley), do contract soaps (been through a lull recently but picking up fortunately), sell timber, and also have the income from rentals from the tenants.
Most of the farm’s population gathers once a day for a cheerful collective lunch served up by Lambert in the refectory, or outside at the big benches in fine weather. It’s a treat I wouldn’t want to miss out on too often: when I joined them, we ate thick tomato and lentil soup, with slices of rye sourdough bread, followed by cold smoked lamb and a stunning salad which featured not only lettuce but also pea shoots, wild garlic, blue borage flowers and orange marigold petals.
The living nutrition courses, taught by Lambert in the big airy kitchen, focus, according to season, on the foods growing or harvested on the farm. The kitchen itself is a vivid study in sustainable living: there are trays bursting with green sprouting seeds, jars containing rose petals, seaweed, spices, mixed herbal teas, bottles of assorted vinegars, in which quietly marinade flower petals, garlic, assorted herbs, a mix of dandelion, nettles and marigolds. A big plastic box of creamy-pink sourdough starter stands on the worktop, ready to be scooped out for the day’s baking.
And local schools often bring children over in the summer. “We need to rethink how we teach kids,” says Fraser. “Some of it should be based in a farm setting, a reconnection with nature. So many children today have never experienced a dark night, or drunk from a stream, they’re afraid of animals and noises, they have no sense of where the food comes from, or that cycle of nature, the leaves falling and making things grow, nourishing the soil. Just watching my grandchildren - they’re city kids - develop a love for the farm, become more familiar with nature and seeing how important that is has been fantastic - I just wish more children could have that experience.”
The herb gardens are huge - great beds of yarrow and comfrey, milk-thistle and marigold, fennel and meadowsweet, with broad paths in between. Romy is apologetic about their state. “It’s completely full of weeds - we had this weird winter earlier this year when it just rained and rained. A lot of the plants simply drowned - those little shoots there are all that is left of our echinacea, and we haven’t seen any St. Johns Wort at all. And when everything finally started growing, I was away for a month, and we were short of volunteers.”
The plan is to find a qualified herbalist who can come here and make this her base. But the herbs have already starred in the first of a series of residential courses: four seasonal weekend courses in experiential herbal medicine, hands-on stuff led by herbalist Anne McIntyre. Over their weekends, her students will spend time foraging for wild herbs in the hedgerows, fields and woods. Then they look at their harvest of herbs, taste them, learn what they’re good for, master the production of a range of herbal products such as infusions, decoctions, glycerites and tinctures, balms and ointments. They will take home a range of preparations for health and wellbeing.
And in the new year, Romy will launch her most ambitious project yet, the first of a series of year-long residential courses for around 10 young people, graduates,or school-leavers, aiming to produce a set of natural leaders, trained in running a business in a fair and ethical way, with highly-developed communication and entrepreneurial skills, and a strong base in the natural world. From Trill Farm, she hopes, a new generation will emerge of purposeful young people empowered and eager to make a difference, as she herself has been doing for the last 35 years.
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