Farmers market at Winchester early one morning.
Update on Old Winchester. Despite us all working very hard to produce more cheese including working some Saturdays we are still very tight on Old Winchester and over Christmas, the age profile is going to drop. That is the bad news, the good news is that from the middle of 2026, all that extra work is going to come to fruition and there will be more available.
Another year beckons , and I have been at Hampshire Farmers Markets since 1999, best part of 25 years. In 2025 I needed to do a bit less so dropped one of the Winchesters. For 2026 I will be withdrawing from Petersfield, sadly. Petersfield won’t be without cheese as there are 3 other producers. This will leave us with the last Winchester and Romsey as it is so close. However I will be at Petersfield for the first Sunday in a few weeks time. Without Farmers Markets in the first 5 years we may not have survived, they were a huge bonus, giving cash flow and experience in an area we were unfamiliar with, and now it time to move on.
Repairs to the reservoir, as it is nearly empty!
The picture above, shows our reservoir with very little water in it after this years hot summer. We dug the reservoir in 1995 and over the passage of time we have experienced a fair degree of erosion around the top lip and have had to spend a week with a digger repairing it with the yellow clay that makes it all water tight. The reservoir is dug into a clay cap that runs across the top of the farm. There is no liner needed to keep the water in, but we do need to keep it in good shape.
