Sally Bendall: ‘Hollow Trees Farm started in a shed I got for Christmas’

When I ask Sally, who turned 60 last year, what’s in store for the shop/cafe/farm trail she laughs heartily. “What isn’t happening this year? Too much!”

Plans for 2022 are ambitious and exciting, and come off the back of a frantic two-year period during Covid, which Sally says truly showed her what teamwork means. “We saw changes literally overnight. Our brilliant maintenance guys made screens on Sunday...by Monday they were everywhere. And we had to turn the shop into click and collect very quickly, using the café as a warehouse.

“We didn’t have an online shop presence, but people kept ringing us asking if they could come and fill up the boot of their car. It just spiralled. It was a weird time, because half of the team were in the shop and half were on furlough. For those of us that were left it was so busy. When I look back now at how everyone just got on with it, and how we came together as a group, it’s incredible really. Especially when some had difficult circumstances at home. It must have been quite frightening for them.”

Looking forward, this weekend Sally says she’s delighted to be back at Hadleigh Show after two years.

And, on June 18, to be a headline sponsor for Taste of Sudbury festival at Melford Hall.

“This year feels a lot more positive,” she beams, revealing more about what’s happening over in Semer right now. Those who live nearby will have noticed the old entrance to the farm has been closed off, and a new one created closer to Monks Eleigh. Not only is this safer, she says, but it’s meant husband Robert’s been able to get on with expanding Hollow Trees’ café.

“That whole area where you used to drive in is being paved and Robert, who’s a great gardener, is getting the space filled with nice things. It’s just a lovely place to be, so we’re looking forward to that being finished.

“And our butchery has just had a revamp, to really push forward what we’ve been very good at – showcasing our own beef, pork and lamb, which is a bit different to most farm shops. The butchery is 10 years old this year!”

She adds she’s “so optimistic” about what they’re building both physically at Hollow Trees, and with the people they’ve got on board – including a swathe of students and apprentices.

Working with young people, and educating them about farm life (and, in the shop, business) is something Sally is passionate about. Many years ago she set up an arm of Hollow Trees that welcomed children and their teachers onto the farm to experience the many facets of country life. “Most of what we do is field to fork, so the shop puts everything into context for children,” she says. “They can find out where their food comes from, we go into the fields to see the animals. We touch on almost every bit of the curriculum. I remember a few years ago we could hear skylarks when we were outside. The teacher had the children lie on the floor, listening to the sound, and we talked about the music The Lark Ascending. That was lovely.

“We’ve done nest building and pond dipping. Last week children were planting cabbages for us with the farm team, and they picked rhubarb and trimmed it for the shop. It’s reality, it’s not contrived.”

Up until lockdown daughter Shan had taken the educational reigns at Hollow Trees, but they’re now firmly back in Sally’s hands. “It’s great. I think it’s the bit of my job I enjoy the most.”

The irony is, Sally was almost denied an education in farming. She had to fight her corner – because she’s a woman – to get a foot in the door. And that’s despite her parents working in the farming world.

Born in Cheltenham, Sally spent her infancy in the Cotswolds where her dad milked cows in a small village near Stratford upon Avon.

When she was five they put down roots on a smallholding in Bradfield St George near Bury St Edmunds, her dad milking Jersey cows in Bradfield St Clare, and with Sally attending the village primary school, Beyton Middle School and Thurston Upper.

Her parents were given first refusal on the farm tenancy where Sally’s dad worked, so on they moved. She recalls the initial spell on the farm being difficult. A drought year. “I remember all the neighbours rallying around to help.”

Seeing the challenges her parents faced didn’t put her off.

“I always wanted to be part of it,” Sally says of farming life, adding that her 18th birthday present was a Jersey heifer called Destiny.

After school Sally made plans to study agriculture marketing at university but then set her heart on Chadacre Agricultural Institute – which only accepted boys at the time. “I wrote to the principal and they said they couldn’t take me but I could enrol on day release for a City and Guilds in agriculture.”

Sally was the only girl on the course, at the college her brother also attended, and where she met Robert (three years her senior), who later joined the staff, becoming her tractor driving lecturer.

“Being in agriculture I was fairly used to being the only girl,” she says. “I just mucked in really.”

In 2018 Sally would go on to gain an honorary degree from UEA for services to agricultural education, alongside a British Empire Medal.

“Chadacre shut down over 30 years ago, but its legacy still lives on. I’m really pleased to be a trustee of the Chadacre Trust (of which Lord Iveagh is chairman) distributing agricultural grants throughout East Anglia. I’m also secretary of the active Chadacre Old Students Association and editor of their newsletter. The institute is still a big part of my life.”

After college, Sally and Robert married, and she took on a rather unusual job, working for Buntings in Colchester as an entomologist’s assistant. “We were growing parasitic insects that we would send out around the country to amateur gardeners. So, you’d grow tobacco plants, then grow the bugs on them, cut the plants and send them out. People would put them in their greenhouses, the eggs would hatch and the bugs would eat the whitefly.”

It was quite a change for Sally, who’d gone to the business to pick freesias initially.

Afterwards, taking a job in grading for an Essex-based company, she started dreaming of having her own farm with her husband. Somewhere to rear animals and raise a family.

They broached the idea with Robert’s dad, who had 140 acres at Semer. “But, by Suffolk agriculture standards that’s small. There wasn’t capacity.

“We put an advert in the EADT, something along the lines of ‘young couple seeks farming opportunity’, which was answered by one person who, by pure coincidence, happened to be an ex-Chadacre student. He had a smallholding on Purdis Heath opposite Suffolk Showground. That was the start of everything.”

Sally and Robert packed up all their belongings in the early 80s, and made haste to Purdis Heath where there was one catch – the 12 acres is protected as a Sight of Special Scientific Interest. There was no house. No hope of building one either. Home became a caravan.

“It made me a very tidy person, living in a caravan,” Sally chuckles.

While Robert got on with growing potatoes and vegetables, she carried on commuting, selling their wares to the various greengrocers and shops dotted along Foxhall and Felixstowe Road, and rearing calves for loose house veal.

“What we also did was bring some of those potatoes and vegetables over to Semer, and sell them from a cart on the opposite side of the road to Robert’s dad’s house. We’d go back two to three times a week.”

Things got busy. So busy Sally gave up her job, and the certainty of a steady income. There was still no hope of building at Purdis Heath, and the couple wanted to start a family – not ideal in a little caravan on a working farm.

“We approached Robert’s dad again and asked if he’d allow us to rent 10 acres of his farm, which he very generously did.”

The couple towed their caravan to Semer in 1986 and parked it under a hollow tree on the land, which still stands today.

They built two sheds. Things were going well. “Then global circumstances started to conspire. Calf prices hit record highs, there was the Chernobyl effect, all sorts of things like that. We thought we were doing OK, but looked at our accounts...and we weren’t. We were very very close to going under and thought ‘this isn’t working’.”

Sally remembers clearly having to make the one person who worked for them at the time redundant. It still makes her upset.

The duo didn’t throw in the towel, however. They’d rented a bit of land in the village to grow their spuds and veg, and Sally carried on successfully selling from a cart on the side of the road, taking a little break (on the night of the Great Storm in 1987) to have son Tom (they also has Shan and Angharad).

“For Christmas that year I asked Robert if I could have a shed. That’s how Hollow Trees started.”

Sally and Robert took on the entire farm in 1996 when Robert’s dad (who sadly passed away last year) retired.

One shed became a series of huts that expanded and expanded, until eventually there was nothing for it. They needed proper bricks and mortar. So began the farm shop as we know it today, with building works beginning in 2007.

At the time such stores didn’t have the kudos or popularity they do now. Nor was there an infrastructure for delivery of local goods.

On Thursdays Sally would strap her kids into the car and drive to Otley College to collect goats’ milk, then on to Margaret Holland for cakes, and to James White for juice. Sometimes she’d stop off at Gressingham to pick up duck. In Coddenham for quail eggs.

“We’d do this big circuit going around to get all this great local produce. When we got home you could hardly see the children past the fairy cakes!”

Were the kids tempted to sneak a few treats when she wasn’t looking?

“No, but I’d often have to open a packet of cakes to keep them quiet in the back!”

Over time the shop has grown exponentially, to include loads of fresh, frozen and ambient produce from across Suffolk. Seasonal vegetables and fruit. Eggs. Ice cream. Bread. There’s an in-house butchery selling their own meat and meal solutions. A deli offering a brilliant selection of cheeses, cured meats and homemade quiches, pizzas, sausage rolls and more.

The farm café is always abuzz with customers, who like the fact it’s incredibly family-friendly, and that the chefs make everything (as far as possible) from scratch in the open kitchen.

Then there’s the farm trail. I remember taking my own children there as nippers with my mummy pals. It became a Friday favourite for keeping them occupied looking at the animals, with cake and a cuppa after.

The trail is, though, a happy accident.

“Because we did loose house veal and people are a bit wary of veal, we always let customers come and look at the cows, and the pigs and other animals. But it just got busier and busier.

“People would come to buy potatoes, and end up showing their children the cows. A friend came out at the end of one summer, there were people everywhere, and he said ‘why don’t you make this into a proper path, like a trail?’.

“That was a lightbulb moment. It was a good 20-odd years ago. By October half term we’d got a path around the farm and through the livestock barn. And it was free. That was our unique point.”

Word got around, and month on month the trail attracted ever-growing numbers of visitors.

“One Easter, around 15 years ago, we literally were inundated,” Sally remembers. “We could barely get out of the house by this time. It was then that we decided we had to charge for the trail, to be able to manage it. It was £1 originally, now £1.50.”

There was some resistance.

“But I think people can see where the money’s gone. It’s all reinvested into the trail, and the different activities. It’s still very much a selling point for us, both families seeing our animals and how we rear them, and them having fun.”

And have fun they do. Especially at special events such as October’s Holloween. My friends and I would visit every year when our children were tots, and often joke about the time we stumbled across a series of ‘blow up dolls’ on the lake and in the woods (note, it’s changed a lot since then).

Sally sighs. “Those dolls!” And tells me the story of how they came to be a feature of the farm for nearly five years. “They’re the reason we do Holloween. The first year Robert grew pumpkins we had a glut. He decided to pile them up in a shed to sell them. Well...then he went to a joke shop in Ipswich and came home with five blow-up dolls dressed as the Spice Girls, with all the Spice Girls clothes on! He put their album on a loop in the barn and sold every single pumpkin.

“People just kept coming to see what he’d done. Every year he got those dolls out in a different guise. In that last year they were sunbathing! I banned him from ever getting them out again.”

Thankfully Robert (and Sally) have other ways to express their wild sides these days, focussing on the farm’s efforts to be as nature-friendly as possible. Many fields have been taken back to grass for pasture. And while that means they’re not growing as many vegetables as before, it does allow for insects and other creatures to flourish.

“We’ve always been fairly low impact. We’re not organic, but because we’ve never been huge scale growers we haven’t sprayed – or only if we see a crop failure coming.

“I think, because we live on the farm, we’re more conscious of what’s around us and Covid really did make us realise how lucky we are to be surrounded by green. I’m even more determined to savour it.”

hollowtrees.co.uk