September 2022 at Stourton

Our Next Big Event – Enchanted Lights!

We are delighted to announce that our popular Enchanted Lights event will take place on 3rd, 4th and 5th November this year.

Last year this event was very popular and spaces booked up quickly so don’t delay!  Book now

Our Enchanted Lights event is a truly magical evening. We create a beautifully lit trail around the trees and grounds of the arboretum (just under 1km long). When you come you will experience:

• coloured lights,
• soft atmospheric music
• special illuminations
• enchanted woodland creatures performing with LED lights
• a charity water fountain, and
• fire dance performances.

Refreshments will be on offer all evening. Purchase marshmallows to toast on the specially designed mini fire-pits under the stars on the Old Hall Lawn and then at the end of the trail enjoy locally produced food from street food vendors around the fire-pit.

Our Safari tent bar will be open……perhaps indulge in a Baileys hot chocolate, mulled wine or locally brewed beer from Ferry Ales Brewery whilst you warm up around the log burner!

There are two slots each evening:
– 5pm – 7pm
– 7pm – 9pm
Plus, a one-way system will be in place to ensure it is an enjoyable experience for all our visitors.

This is a lovely alternative evening’s entertainment to a traditional bonfire or fireworks night and is perfect for smaller children and dog owners (well-behaved dogs on leads are welcome!).

This is an event not to be missed.

Please take advantage of this opportunity to buy your tickets early and bring your friends / family as we have sold out in previous years. For more information or to buy tickets please click here.

Sunflowers for Ukraine Event

We had some great feedback from our Sunflowers event. We were tagged into some lovely pictures on Facebook adn Instagram.  We loved this video courtesy of Ashley Moat. Sunflower Video  Thank you!

Even though the event could only take place over a couple of weekends we were delighted by the number of visitors and more importantly we raised a huge amount of money. We were proud to donate £1,854 to DEC Humanitarian Appeal to help the people suffering in Ukraine. We’d like to thank each and every visitor and donor who helped to make this possible.

Not content with raising lots of money for charity, our sunflowers also starred in the Lincoln Cathedral Flower Festival. We supplied sunflowers to Woodhall Spa Flower Club who made a number of fabulous exhibits in the Cloisters of Lincoln Cathedral. The flower festival celebrated the life and works of St Hugh of Lincoln, as well as many other notable visionaries who’s “ideas and actions have shaped the world we live in and changed our lives”.  The Woodhall Spa Flower Club beautifully captured the agricultural revolution in their stunning arrangements. We were proud that our sunflowers were part of this.

We’re hoping the sunflower seeds will soon be ready to harvest both to be used to crush and create sunflower oil and to be re-sown elsewhere on the farm as part of our crop rotation for our event next year…!

Weddings

Our last wedding this year was held on Saturday 20^th August and we heard from one of the guests who came along:

“We attended our friends’ wedding at Stourton Estates and really think its the nicest wedding we’ve ever been to. Such a beautiful natural environment.”

We now only have one date remaining for 2023 and are taking bookings for 2024 so if you’d like to hold your reception in the beautiful grounds of the estate and safari tent here please get in touch…

Autumn Artisan Market

On Sunday the 18^th September we hosted our second Artisan Market with Lincolnshire Makers. We are delighted that this event was enjoyed by so many people and that around 80 different local businesses attending as stall holders had the opportunity to share their work and talents with so many visitors.

For this event, and knowing how many visitors to anticipate following the success of the first event in June, we managed to be much better organized. We put in place better car parking arrangements, and signage as well as more food vendors. We know we can always improve things and amongst other tweaks for future events we will be looking to add more toilets!

Thank you to all the stall holders and visitors, as well as Team Stourton, who did a great job both in the lead up and on the day itself, to ensure that it was a success.

We’ve created a picture gallery of some photos kindly taken by Anthony Brian Photography on the day.  Click here to have a look.

Deer Diary

Summer drought was extremely challenging here, we spent a lot of time ensuring the herds had plenty of shade, water and most problematic of all food!  We actually fed them hay during the hottest weeks when the grass died off – certainly not ideal during the summer.  However, with the recent rain we are pleased the enclosures are green once again and they have some proper grass to eat before winter!

We’ve spent the last few weeks separating the herds ready for the rut, weaning the calves, giving them a copper bolus to keep them healthy and de-antlering the stags for their own safety – and ours!

We are nearly ready for Winston and Nelson to join their ladies for the rut – and they are ready!

If you live nearby you will hear the occasional roar in the months to come – it is nothing to worry about, the stags are just asserting their dominance in the herd!

Kiln Dried Logs

The kiln has been up and running through the summer to prepare a shed full of dry timber ready to keep our customers supplied with quality kiln dried logs through the winter.

Demand has been strong this year and so we would encourage customers to get stocked up, we’ve removed the limit on the number of logs you can buy to help get prepared for the winter.  At the minute stocks are good but we can’t guarantee a continual supply all the way through the winter if demand stays at current levels.

Don’t miss out! Click here to order your kiln dried logs for winter.

On the Farm

A fair bit of time has elapsed since the last time we published the blog, in that time we’ve been a little occupied on the farm to say the least!

Harvest kicked off in the middle of July with winter barley and didn’t really let up until we finished in the 3rd week of august. It was one of the earliest, shortest and most straightforward harvests we have known. The majority of grain was cut dry, yields were variable but we have achieved a pleasing overall average. Given the lack of rainfall, the very sandy areas of the farm performed very poorly, this was offset by the more ‘bodied’ land performing very well.

Having said we have finished harvest, we are actually still waiting for our sunflower crop to ripen. We expect to cut these on a good day some time in October.

Alongside harvest the team have been keeping up with drilling oilseed rape and cover crops, as well as cultivations ahead of our autumn sown cereals and beans. As always it has been a mammoth effort for all involved to get to this stage, massive thanks go to Ken, Dan, Dan the man, James, Mark, Archie and Ed for their efforts.

Our attention has now turned to sowing our winter crops, winter barley is largely finished, rolled and has had a pre-emergence herbicide applied. As this goes to press we are starting in earnest on our wheat. We will start on our fields which are cleaner of blackgrass before moving onto the more ‘at risk fields’ as we move into October.

While this is all going on we will be monitoring for slug activity and applying molluscicide pellets in areas where the slugs are hollowing grain or grazing emerged crop. Grass weed levels are being monitored in the oilseed rape, with a likely application of herbicide to be made to take out any cereal volunteers and blackgrass within the next couple of weeks. We are also looking to make a start to our sugar beet lifting campaign this week, hopefully the dry weather won’t have affected yields too badly here…. Time will tell.

We’ve still plenty to do but we are making good progress and have to be pleased with how things have gone and are going thus far.

We have some great ideas for more exciting things coming soon – so watch this space and our social media channels for updates…

Don’t forget your tickets to our last big event this year – Enchanted Lights 3-5^th November.

Best wishes

Antony & Helen