Straight from the Gate: A Local's Guide to Devon's Farm Shops

By the end of September, Devon has done most of the year's growing. The apples are coming off the trees, the first pheasants are hanging in the game larders, and every lane in the county seems to end at a chalkboard promising eggs, squash and somebody's grandmother's chutney. This is the season when a farm shop stops being a nice idea and becomes the sensible place to do the week's shopping — the shelves are at their fullest, the butchery counters at their most interesting, and the produce has usually travelled about as far as you could throw it.

Devon's farm shops grew out of honesty boxes and farm gates, and the best of them haven't forgotten it. The test we apply is simple: does the person behind the counter know the farm the meat came from, and was the jam made in a kitchen you could walk to? Here are six that pass, spread from the edge of Dartmoor to the Cornish border.

Ullacombe Farm, Haytor Road

The B3387 out of Bovey Tracey climbs hard towards Haytor, past the same wooded edge of the moor we covered in our guide to Devon's temperate rainforest, and about halfway up it delivers you to Ullacombe Farm. It started a little over a decade ago as an honesty box at the roadside — fresh eggs, cakes on the side — and has grown into a farm shop, butchery and café run by farmers Debbie and Lucy with a team of more than thirty, aged anywhere from fourteen to sixty.

The café occupies what used to be a chicken shed, and if you look down you can still find chicken footprints pressed into the floor. It does a Big Barn Breakfast that has earned its capital letters, Sunday roasts with a following, and a "twisted" afternoon tea that swaps the dainty finger-sandwich routine for pigs in blankets, mozzarella sticks and a chocolate fondue — the scones with cream and jam survive intact, mercifully. That afternoon tea for two is also the prize in our current drop, if you'd rather win one than book one. The shop sells the farm's award-winning jams and marmalades alongside homemade ready meals, pies and quiches, and the butchery counter carries meat from the farm itself and from other Devon farmers. Dogs are welcome, and small children tend to disappear towards the play area and its vintage tractor while the adults queue.

Darts Farm, Topsham

You can't write about Devon farm shops without Darts Farm, so let's get the famous one in early. Ronald Dart started here in 1971 with a pick-your-own operation on the flat fields by the Clyst, and his three sons — Michael and James on the retail side, Paul on the farm — have grown it into something closer to a food village, drawing around seventeen thousand visitors a week at the last count. The Farm Retail Association named it Large Farm Shop of the Year in 2022, one of several times the industry has handed Darts its top honours.

What keeps it honest is that the fields still matter: much of what's on the shelves is grown within sight of the food hall, and the day's picking dictates the displays. There's a fishmonger, a proper butchery, a cheese room and more places to eat than some villages have. The cider aisle alone carries real history — the story of Green Valley Cyder and its century-old press, which we told in our guide to Devon cider country.

Quicke's, Newton St Cyres

Between Exeter and Crediton, in the valley of the River Creedy, the Quicke family has farmed the same land since 1540. Fourteen generations later, Mary Quicke — who took the business on in 1987 — and her daughter Jane run one of the most respected cheesemaking operations in Britain, hand-cheddaring curds the old way and binding the truckles in cloth to mature, tasting hundreds of cheeses as they age to decide when each is ready. The starter cultures are heritage strains rescued from dairies of the 1960s and 70s, and the herd grazes outside for most of the year on the Creedy's rich valley pasture.

The farm shop at Home Farm is a modest affair compared with the cheese's reputation, which is rather the charm. You can buy clothbound cheddar at every stage of maturity a few hundred yards from where it was made, along with local jams and chutneys. It keeps quiet weekday hours, so check before you travel — and if you time it right between spring and early autumn, there are guided farm tours too.

Powderham Farm Shop, Kenton

On the western bank of the Exe, the farm shop on the Powderham Castle estate comes with a view most retailers would kill for: the castle, its deer park, and the estuary beyond. Family-run under new owners since 2023, it stocks local produce, baked goods and a deli counter, and the butchery draws its meat from Westcountry farms.

The reason to make the trip in autumn, though, is the venison. Each year at this season the butchery carries Powderham venison from deer reared on the estate's own park — about as short a supply chain as meat gets, from parkland you can see from the car park. There's a bistro alongside if you'd rather someone else did the cooking, and the birdlife on this stretch of the estuary makes the drive down the Kenton road a pleasure in itself.

Stokeley Farm Shop, Stokenham

In the South Hams, just up the hill from Torcross and the long freshwater ley at Slapton, Stokeley Farm Shop has quietly become a one-stop argument for never visiting a supermarket again. The family-run shop at Stokeley Barton wraps a deli counter, a butchery, fresh fruit and vegetables and a plant centre into one yard, and gathers a small colony of independent traders around itself — including a rotating "pop-up shed" that gives local producers a counter for a few weeks at a time.

Next door, its sister business South Hams Drinks runs a taphouse, which makes Stokeley one of the few farm shops in Devon where you can buy the Sunday joint and drink a local pint within the same fifty yards. Coming off Start Bay after a blowy beach walk, that combination is hard to argue with.

Strawberry Fields, Lifton

Right on the Cornish border, Strawberry Fields is what happens when a farm stall refuses to stop growing. The Mounce family opened their pick-your-own strawberry fields in 1990 and sold the fruit from a barrow outside the house for about five years; the farm shop proper opened its doors on the first of June 2002. In 2005 came the Lifton pasty, made to Jo Mounce's secret recipe handed down from her late mum, Avice, and the pasties have been pulling people off the A30 ever since.

The farm behind the shop runs to two hundred acres, with Ruby Red Devon cattle grazing it since 2008 and enough solar panels and wind turbine capacity — installed back in 2014 — to make the whole operation self-sufficient in energy. Families around West Devon know it best for the seasonal spectaculars: the strawberry season in summer, and Pumpkin Fest, which returns this October with a pick-your-own pumpkin patch, a maize maze and a barrel train for the small ones.

The honesty box lives on

Six shops, six different answers to the same question: how do you sell food from the place it was grown without losing what made it good? Some have become destinations with restaurants attached; some are still, at heart, a counter and a farmer. All of them are busiest and best right now, with the harvest in and the venison season arriving.

Our advice is unglamorous but sincere: keep a cool bag in the boot from now until Christmas. The chalkboards at the end of Devon's lanes have never been more worth stopping for.