Apples, grapes and golden rapeseed oil: celebrating 90 years of Leckford Estate, the Waitrose farm

If you’re a Hampshire-based, tea-drinking, cake-loving gardener with a penchant for nicely packaged biscuits and old-fashioned apple juice, chances are you have visited the Longstock Park Farm Shop and Cafe in Stockbridge.

It’s the place to go for afternoon tea; coming away with a clematis or two from the nursery next door is par for the course. But few who visit will be aware of the vast estate that surrounds it – the 4,000 acres that comprise Leckford, the farm belonging to Waitrose & Partners.

Driving towards Longstock Park, spot the cottages, some of them thatched, sporting racing-green window frames – properties lived in by company staff (those ‘partners’).

The rows and rows of grapevines, the orchards, the wheat fields – they’re all part of Leckford Estate, which was originally purchased by John Spedan Lewis in 1929.

Having started with 1,800 acres, the founder of the John Lewis Partnership lived here until he died in 1963, buying more land in that time (as well as, in 1937, Waitrose Limited, then just 10 grocery shops), and developing farming practices.

Ninety years on, 85 per cent of the land is used for farming, across arable and grazing fields and woodland. Now, the estate is a supplier to Waitrose as much as a leisure retreat – with a golf course and country lodge – for its staff.

Skirting around its eastern boundary brings one to the mushroom houses, home to 16 growing rooms (called ‘cells’) that turn out 26 tons of cultivated chestnuts each week.

The scent is noticeable even from the car park; earthy, fruity almost. Inside, compost is packed into what look like enormous metal bunk beds and saturated with water to stimulate the mycelium from which the fungi develop.

And how they develop: increasing by four per cent every hour, the weight of the mushrooms can double in a day, producing diameters from an inch to almost 16 inches across closed-cup, portobellini and portobello varieties as they mature.

Like the mushrooms, which are grown and packaged on-site to be sold with a Leckford label in stores, rapeseed oil is another of the farm’s success stories.

‘We reckon we’ve sold over one million bottles since we started producing it,’ says oilseed processing manager Zoe Bamford, one of the 160 employees who work on the estate.

Oilseed rape is grown over 400 acres and spends almost a full year in the ground before it is harvested and sent through sieves, presses and filters to produce the golden liquid that is bottled here.

The outer husks of the seeds, which are turned into pellets, or cakes, in the process, are a high-protein byproduct fed to the docile dairy cows outside.

‘Longstock dates back to Viking times, when longships would be brought up from Southampton to boat builders here,’ explains farming manager Andrew Ferguson, as he scans the land.

There are even Iron Age settlements surrounding the chalky River Test’s water meadows and, on the south-facing slopes nearby, the soil type needed to grow grapes.

Three months away from harvesting, they’re pipsqueaks, the largest no bigger than peas. There’s pinot noir with its silvery-grey foliage, chardonnay and pinot meunier – the holy trinity of champagne grapes, produced here for Sussex winery Ridgeview to make into Leckford Estate’s English sparkling wine.

And like those in Champagne, they are not immune to frost. In April 2017, when France’s most famous winemaking regions suffered from plunging temperatures, Ferguson held his own candlelit vigil, lighting 800 paraffin cans between the vines three nights running to stave off the chill.

‘We started lighting at 2am to be ready for the coldest spell an hour later.’ In the summer warmth, it’s hard to imagine this – or that the gnarled, 37-year-old Bramley orchard, among others bearing Cox’s and Braeburns as well as Conference and Comice pears, will soon be relieved of its crops. Their bounty will fill the fruit aisles and be turned into juice or – in the case of the Cox’s – cider made by Aspall.

This sprawling estate in the Test Valley produces flour and processes milk as well as hosting the Waitrose cricket team on Wednesdays and opening its tranquil water garden to the public in the summer. ‘Diversity is our resilience,’ says Ferguson.

To that end, Jazz apple trees have been planted to celebrate the farm’s 90th birthday, as well as a cluster of oaks and hazels, their roots inoculated with the desirable truffle fungus. It’ll be a while before either produces something edible, but they’re a delicious prospect for the next 90 years.