New opening times
We’re changing our opening times slightly – we’ll be closed on Tuesdays from now on, as well as Mondays. Otherwise we’re open as normal from 10-4.30.
Reopening on February 14
Due to the ever expanding list of Things That Need Doing, we’re going to reopen a week later than originally planned -so it’s February 14 now. See you then.
Christmas opening and January closing
We’re open over most of Christmas, so if you can drag yourself away from the Christmas leftovers drop in. We’re only closed Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, and then we’ll be shut until February 7 for some time off.
Free drinks during December with lunch
Well, almost – we’ll give you a pot of our fine leaf tea or a cup of our aromatic coffee when you buy soup or a ploughmans and a piece of our lovely cake (not too difficult, we reckon) from Tuesday to Friday during December.
All of our food is made from scratch in our kitchen, and that includes the bread we serves with the soup and the ploughmans. We do not buy in soup and reheat it – we make it fresh everyday. We make coleslaw from raw ingredients and dress it lightly with our own dressing, not some gloop from a catering supplier full of emulsifiers and thickeners. Our milk, butter and cream are organic, from the dairy across the river, and we use stoneground flour in our bread.
Come and find out for yourself what we do this month.
Apple pressing
Devon is awash with apple juice in the late autumn, so we thought we’d add to the deluge and press some of our own. Tom and Becky Morrow, who make the fantastic cordials we sell (have a look at tomorrowscordial.co.uk) lent us their water-powered press and macerator so for the first time we could juice the fruits of our orchard ourselves.
Apple pulp from the macerator - this goes into the press
The press is beautifully simple – put the pulped apples into the big perforated drum, and turn on the water. There’s a rubber bag in the centre of the press that fills with water and crushes the apple pulp. It’s clean, quick and efficient, leaving a solid, dry mass of pulp.
So we have plenty of juice. Buy it for £2 a bottle to take home (pasteurised so it keeps for more than three days) or get it by the glass in the café. And we’ll be doing a hot spiced juice at weekends, with cinnamon, star anise and nutmeg.
Free heating (well, free fuel)
We’ve been using our wood-fired boiler for a couple of months now – it provides hot water for the cafe and will do the heating, when we turn it on. It’s a pretty simple piece of kit – you stick wood in the boiler, it heats the water which is stored in a big, heavily insulated cylinder.
But getting it operational was quite a lot harder than we anticipated, because most heating engineers round these parts haven’t encountered these systems before. After four false starts, we found the very talented Mr Rueben Newcombe, who fitted the pipework, and had the system set up and commissioned by Stoves Online, based near Dartmouth.
This does not come cheap. In fact, the fitting and the flue cost as much as the boiler, the tank and the shipping from Poland, which blew holes in my theory that this would be a relatively economical way of providing heating, and no more expensive than a conventional gas combi boiler and an LPG tank.
There is an argument for wood as a CO2 neutral fuel – the CO2 released by the burning wood was, at one point, present in the atmosphere so you’re not adding any new CO2, although that strikes me as a slightly absurd when we’re trying to reduce atmospheric CO2 .
But the best thing about wood is that you can find it lying around, which you can’t do with gas or electricity. So now we’re heating our water with free wood gathered from our land – cutting it up takes a bit more effort and you have to be in possession of a chainsaw as well as a method of moving the logs – which, as gas and electricity prices keep rising, is a good feeling.
Everything’s £1 in our shrub sale
All of the shrubs in our sale are now £1 each. We’ve got trees, hollies, myrtle, hebes, viburnum, eunoymous and masses more, for just a quid. All Devon grown to organic principles, without heating so they’re properly tough and healthy. Now is a good time to fill any gaps in the garden before the spring, so take advantage of our affordable shrubs and get planting.
Shrub sale starts October 1
It’s that time of year when we have a bit of a clear out and decide to sell of some of our stock. So starting on October 1 we’re knocking 50 per cent off loads of our shrubs, just in time for you to get your garden planted up for next year. All our plants are Devon grown so they’re perfect for our climate. We’ve got masses of hedging plants too, all reduced, along with some perennials.
Now serving lunch
With so many people asking for something a little more, well, lunchy than cakes we had to start concocting some savoury offerings, and now we have.
From midday everyday we’ll be doing a soup with homemade bread and a savoury tart of some sort. Both will change every couple of days, or even everyday, and they will be made with what we have to hand. The bread will be made on site by me – no dry shop-bought loaves here.
Hope to see you this week for lunch.
We’re open this bank holiday Monday
We’ll be open this Monday for the bank holiday, so come and say hello. We’ll open a little later than usual – 11am rather than 10am.
If you’re visiting Staverton’s Elizabethan Fayre on Monday afternoon, we’re a 15 minute walk or a 3 minute car journey away, and we’ve got a stall there too.
And if you take the steam train from Totnes, we’re a pleasant five minute wander over the bridge. Just get off at Staverton station and you’ll see our sign by the car park.
