Located in deepest Somerset, right in the heart of a working farm, there’s a homegrown café that values simple, fresh food and the people who eat it…
As we drove up the rural path to Glebe Farm, the colourful outbuilding that houses Pitney Farm Café emerged amidst the greenery. Adjacent to the vegetable patch, I could immediately tell that this rustic wooden structure was everything I had hoped it would be. This was a café that truly lived by the field to plate mantra.
Pitney Farm Café is the brainchild of 29-year-old Lily Farmer, who in early 2017 teamed up with Rob and Lizzie from Glebe Farm in Langport to open a foodie business with a difference. As an individual, Lily is deeply passionate about food, farming and community; believing that bettering our relationship to food is the answer to many of today’s difficulties.
The café started out as a concept – a place for Lily to put her ethical mindset to the test and produce seasonal menus with homegrown, nourishing food. To get the ball rolling, she launched a crowdfunding campaign in late 2016 in order to test the water and find out if Somerset residents wanted something like Pitney Farm Café in the area. Needless to say, she was astonished to find that the local community helped her to exceed her target in just two weeks.
“It was a great outcome,” Lily told us, “To commemorate everyone’s generosity we held a dinner for 60 people in one of the barns. From there, we went on to apply for a few different grants and thankfully we got them. We’re part-funded by the EU and part funded by a philanthropist organization called ‘unlimited’, who gave us money to fund our children’s food workshops”.
Pitney Farm Café is a no-frills affair. It’s a modest sized building filled with a mix-match assortment of chairs and tables to provide enough seating for around 25 people. There’s a wood burning stove, a bookcase brimming with magazines and cookbooks, a wonderful selection of homemade cakes and pastries in a case illuminated by fairy lights, and a large blackboard of tempting specials.
The small space exudes a warmth and charm that brings you back to simpler times. But perhaps the most notable fixture of the café is the large window which overlooks the vegetable patch beyond. Before you even try a mouthful of Lily’s seasonal menu, you can instantly connect to the produce outside. “We get a lot of comments about how nice it is to see where our food comes from” Lily explained, “It gets me really excited because that’s exactly what we wanted.”
As we sat cradling our coffee cups, Lily came to join us, sliding a plate across the table and handing us cutlery. “I think you ought to try this,” she said, pointing at a vibrant slice of Bakewell tart on a delicate china plate. “We’re very excited about this product. It’s made with yellow split pea flour and Somerset chuckleberry; which is a cross between a redcurrant, a gooseberry and a jostaberry.”
Farmer by name and farmer by nature, Lily is a walking encyclopedia of horticultural knowledge. This unique chuckleberry treat was just one example of her adventurous attitude to cooking. “We bought 10 kilos of the berries back in summer and now we’re working our way through the freezer, putting them into anything and everything. We’ve made them into jam and we recently had a delicious bourbon and chuckleberry pulled pork on the menu.”
Pitney Farm Café is kept up and running by a small team of part timers who share Lily’s commitment to transparent food ethics. “First and foremost, we try to use everything from the farm itself,” she explained, “Meat and eggs are only ever from here, as are all of the vegetables in high season. We also know two other Somerset farms personally and we can rely on them for vegetables in low season. Overall, our aim is to pay our suppliers fairly and to better connect our customers with their food”.
Lily’s personal moto is ‘question everything’, so it should come as no surprise that as well as managing the day to day running of the café, she also takes the time to hold classes for local school children to educate them about the food on their plates. Pick & Cook lessons are Pitney Farm Café’s fun way to get children outside and learning more about the land. Each lesson sees Lily take a group of children out to the vegetable gardens, where they pick vegetables together and come back to cook a vegetarian lunch for their families.
“It’s all about getting children used to vegetables” she explained, “Some of them don’t eat the whole lunch, but they do at least get to try things on their way around the vegetable patch. It’s lovely because we get a mixed bunch of children in. Some have parents with allotments and know a lot already, whereas others don’t know the first thing about veggies and enjoy discovering new ingredients”.
I was shocked to learn that Lily herself was once a child who knew very little about the provenance of her dinner. Surprisingly, her love of food is entirely self-taught. In her last year studying media studies at Brighton University, she fell into a group of friends who were passionate about horticulture and joined them working on a community garden project for disadvantaged children. Shortly after graduation, she was convinced to move to Somerset and start working on a vegetable farm. “It was a very steep learning curve”, she laughed, “But it was nice to have access to a lot of free food!”
While getting your hands dirty and growing your own produce might seem like a million miles away from the glitzy world of the media, Lily does feel that her degree set her up for a life of growing and cooking. “One of the modules we studied was looking at the shortfalls of communication and the link between politics and society” she explained, “In a roundabout way, I feel like this led me to what I’m doing today. Food and information are quite tied together and we need to better understand where our food comes from. To me, the link is obvious. I just hope that what we do here at Pitney Farm Café will make others see how brilliant homegrown food can be”.
Find out more: www.pitneyfarmshop.co.uk/pitney-farm-cafe