Shorter notice 1

Ìt has taken a wedding for us to find a locally celebrated establishment called 'Fanny's Farm Shop', despite it being well known to some of our neighbours and despite its occasional appearance on the small screen.

Hard to capture the flavour of the place in a single photograph, being a medley of garden, sheds, shops, rural junk and tea rooms. This last being rather good, offering a small range of light meals and being strong in the cake & bun department. Notable also for being the only brick built place that I know, open to the public, which does not have mains electricity; they even have a mechanical rather than an electrical till to take your money. But there is a generator to drive, inter alia, the web cam onto the chicken run which provides entertainment in one of the tea rooms.

From the shop we bought two sorts of apples and one sort of nuts. The russets were fine, the regular apples - large, largely red affairs - were not so fine, being early apples, that is to say apples which do not shelf well. The nuts were very good: good both in that they were much larger and riper than the nuts that can be picked in Horton Lane and in that they had not been kiln dried, and so made rather bitter, in the way of the hazel nuts which come from the continent. I wondered what the owners of the nut plantations do about the grey squirrels which destroy the nuts in our own garden. Do the nuts simply swamp the squirrels if you have plenty of the former or do the nut farmers stay up at night and shoot them with shotguns, in the way of some strawberry farmers that we used to know, squirrels being a major pest for them too?

For more information see http://fannysfarmshop.co.uk/.