Creating our big dream one sleep at a time.
It’s fair to say we are not a farm yet, but we have dreams of becoming a farm or at least a smallholding and a maker space.
We started small learning about keeping chickens, turkeys and ducks. We read book after book, searched the internet and joined internet groups to find out as much as we could.
Since 2008 on and off, we have been looking after and from time to time, hatching different breeds of chickens, Aylesbury ducks and Bronze turkeys.
When we have ducks or chickens they are actively used around the land to help us garden and keep the slug population down.
Our learning and activities extended to things like, using the ducks manure/used bedding for composting to use around our flowers, shrubs, fruit bushes and vegetables.
Spinning and Dyeing
We have also been learning about the husbandry of angora goats (mohair), angora rabbits (angora) and llamas to feed Sarah’s passion for spinning, machine knitting and weaving although the clay ground gets very wet over the winter so getting any goats of our own is on hold at the moment.
Due to this we currently source fleeces at shearing time from friends to prepare, dye and spin.
Aeroponics and growing your own garden
We have also been learning since 2017 about aeroponics, plant propagation, growing using grow lights and trying to grow a garden in most part from scratch. You can find out more about this in our Grow your own Garden blog.
We have rebuilt the smallholdings house and started the vast work involved taming the small acreage around the house.
Maker Centre/Learning Centre
Our hope is to use some of our land and buildings to run courses in the near future .
We would like to include lots of things we have been learning including spinning and dyeing.
Also we hope to provide access for people to learn to use some of the equipment we have been investing in both new and second hand over the years. This includes things like 3D printers, C02 lasers, CNC machines, knitting machines, sewing machines, cutting machines to name a few.
At some point hopefully a few pigs will once again become part of the plan.
Cranford Farm History
The original story began in the late 1940’s when Dorothy and Bob Oakley moved into a bungalow in Houndsfield Lane.
Over time they began acquiring other smaller parcels on land on the lane and operating as a small scale pig farm. The farmhouse was known as Cranford or Cranford Farm (hence the website name) and some of the land was sometimes known as Balmoral Farm.
By the 1970s Bob had been joined by his two sons with up to 600 pigs at its peak.
Michael and Malcolm were well known within the area collecting food waste from takeaways, greengrocers and bakers. A common practice on pig farms which went on until the 1980s.
After Bob’s death in the early 1980s the sons kept the farm going and had already diversified into operating other businesses from the small pig farm as well as keeping the pigs, goats and turkeys.
The end of the 1980’s saw the closure of the pig farm with it becoming uneconomically viable for small scale pig farmers to continue given changes in legislation about being able to process food waste to feed pigs.
Fast-track 30 years and the story starts again.
After Michael’s death his son Simon inherited a part share of the farm and he and his wife Sarah have been very slowly planning and working towards bringing the smallholding back to life ever since.