Mary Quicke

Food & Drink

Mary is sitting on the stone steps of the farmhouse bagging up some of the fruits she’s just picked from the garden. She looks up, smiles and welcomes us in. This farm has been in the Quicke family for 14 generations which Mary tells us dates back to the 1540s.

Mary grew up on the farm but in her teenage years headed off to London. She hadn’t planned on returning, but by her mid-late twenties she was back in Devon. “I’d spoken to my dad who described this beautiful mechanism, he said, ‘It’s really simple Mary; we grow the crops and the grass to feed the cows, they produce the milk, we make that into cheese, the remaining whey is fed to the cows, then the cows manure goes back onto the crops and the grass and the whole things starts again.’ And I thought, I want to be part of that again.”