Piccalily by Prestwold

Last week I visited an exciting new venture into artisanal food shopping. Lily Packe-Drury-Lowe takes her farm shop to various local venues and shoppers visit her modified horse trailer to buy a mind-boggling range of foodstuffs. How on earth she stores everything I really can’t guess.

Lily’s purpose is to sell local food to local people. Her products have been made by local artisans (including herself), of known provenance and without the use of ultra-processing or long-distance transport.

Here are some of the things you can buy from her: meat, jams, jellies, vegetables, fruit, hot and cold sausage rolls, bread, prepared meals for you to cook, coffee, tea, yoghurt, ice cream, cakes, biscuits, honey, and cheeses.

Lily makes all the preserves, the delicious sausage rolls (exceptionally good), cakes and biscuits and grows some of the vegetables and fruit. Prestwold Farm produces the honey and she was proud to tell me that it was the only blossom honey in the UK last year to get two stars in the Great Taste Awards.

All her meat comes from Millie Spencer’s butcher shop in Thrussington, much of it from animals reared on Millie’s family farm. Millie gave a very popular demonstration of her butchery skills during Lily’s Grand Opening event at the start of June so you don’t just get goods at Piccalily!

Lily’s artisanal cheese comes from the Leicestershire Handmade Cheese Company based in Sparkenhoe Farm, Upton. The milk is produced by the farm and is unpasteurised and therefore ‘raw’. This means that the cheeses can only be made by traditional methods and in small quantities.

Her ice cream is made by Leicestershire’s Dreamy Cow Company and the yoghurt from Manor Farm, Thrussington. Coffee beans are roasted by Neil Wheeler in his garage and bread comes from a tiny local bakery. So, you get the drift: these are all small local businesses using traditional methods.

And this isn’t all; Lily was positively bursting with new ideas for the future including the imminent arrival of four pigs which she will rear in her garden for pork! With all the resources of Prestwold Farm, she aims to grow as much of the vegetables and fruit as she can, not to mention various rare breeds of cattle. She hopes to introduce a range of game and rabbit meat in the winter, both as raw packaged meat and as ready meals including game charcuterie which she will produce by dry curing.

Lily’s previous employment experiences cover an impressive range. She was a chef before studying biology at university. She then worked for several years at the Mars Pet Care Centre as a cellular and molecular biologist. Her latest venture truly brings her skills together. She commented on the similarity between cooking and chemistry.

Barrow Voice wishes Lily every success in her interesting venture. We recommend you just turn up and try out what she has to offer. We think you’ll love it. To find out where the Piccalily pop-up shop is on a particular day, visit @PiccalilyFarmShop, Facebook or Instagram.

Judith Rodgers