A Year on the Estate: 2021 in Review
From all at South Ormsby Estate to all our readers, we offer our heartfelt thanks for your support throughout a challenging year. As 2021 winds down and the days gradually start to lengthen again, we’ve put together a whistle-stop tour of an eventful year on the Estate. Enjoy!
JANUARY
We started 2021 with two exciting projects. We looked ahead to spring and summer with the ‘Incredible Edible South Ormsby’ community garden initiative. As the year unfolded, Nikki Coxon, Toby Ridsdale and many hard-working volunteers helped us create and maintain community gardens where fruit, vegetables and herbs have thrived.
Online, we launched ‘Our Days’. Inspired by ‘My Days’, the serialised memoir of Kath Brown who worked in service at South Ormsby Hall in the 1930s, ‘Our Days’ grew into a 20-part chronicle of life in the Lincolnshire Wolds throughout the 20th century. We’re grateful to all who shared their vivid memories and helped turn this project into an important piece of local history. The first instalment came courtesy of Jo Houlden, for whom a 1940s childhood in South Ormsby was a time of weddings on the Estate, hedge-high snowdrifts and riding in Mrs M’s dumb waiter.
In some of 2021’s coldest weather, we showcased our work to sustainably renovate the Estate’s original rental houses, drastically reducing their dependence on fossil fuels and increasing their energy efficiency.
FEBRUARY
As the snow and ice relented and snowdrops blanketed the ground, we beefed up our kitchen-garden recycling by building capacious compost bins with cargo pallets. In the spirit of waste reduction, we also launched a Lincoln Red offal box which sold out in days.
Gin Distillery Manager Tristan Jørgensen notched up more plaudits. This month, the Craft Gin Club recognised Marie Jeanne as their best-selling pink gin of 2020, hailing it as ‘unconventional’ and ‘defying expectations’. Marie Jeanne went on take gold at the World Gin Awards in March.
‘Our Days’ told the story of new Cheese Creamery Operator, Mark Vines, who grew up on Lincolnshire Farms and came to the Estate via the British Army and the restaurant trade.
MARCH
We looked at the benefits of regenerative agriculture, and the Saturday Club helped us put principles into practice by assembling 50 bird boxes and installing them across the parkland in time for spring. Many more bird boxes were to follow.
Throughout 2021, we stepped up our investment in young people, recruiting through the Kickstart scheme, through our graduate programme and through our Saturday Club for 13-17-year-olds. Our Graduate Placement Officer Clarice Weston told us all about her exciting role “opening up the world to the next generation”.
Out on the land, Matthew Davey cracked on with beautiful, traditional plashing and we started planting areas of land for the specific benefit of wild birds and pollinators.
