Hello berry pickers!

After a fab summer of sunshine, the very welcome rain has now arrived.
Great for the plants, less so for the berries.
As we are quiet now, the cafe will have it’s final day this Sunday 2nd August.
Last chance for tea and cake to reward your berry picking!

We are still fully open in the berry field for at least another week or two,
so here’s a quick fruit update:

We grow six different types of berry.
Redcurrants looking amazing, not just for jelly but great scattered over salads,
or with meringues & cream.
Raspberries are continuing to plump up and ripen with the welcome rain
Tayberries (blackberry/raspberry hybrid) make amazing jam, ice-cream or
compote - a few more ripening daily.
Blackcurrants have finished.
Gooseberries have finished.
Strawberries have finished.

Check Fruit for more details on what’s ready when.

* A mixed forecast until early August, showers are very random so do check
forecast for us - ‘Maxton’ area
* We grow our berries outside, no polytunnels, just open air sunshine & rain.
This means a shorter Scottish season of extra sweet and juicy fruit.

Open 7 days, 10am till 7pm

About your visit:

• Free to enter, just pay for what you pick.
  Preferably pay before eating, then head to picnic area.
  Cards and cash accepted.

• No booking, just come any time you fancy!
  Open 7 days, 10am till 7pm. Check the weather for our area (Maxton) before you visit.
  It can often be dry with us when raining further west.
  We have lovely sunsets looking out over the Tweed valley towards the Eildon Hills and Smailholm Tower.

• Card/contactless payments are easiest for us
  but we do accept cash both in fruit field and cafe.

• Lots of picnic tables around the cafe area. Straw bales for playing on all around.

• The fields are fairly flat for wheelchairs, pushchairs and elderly visitors.
  A few chairs are dotted around the berries to rest your legs
  or feel free to come and hang out at the cafe while others pick.

• Toilets & baby changing can be found down by the cafe.
  No steps but a bit of gravel around them.

• An outside drinking water tap is also down by the cafe.

• Dogs very welcome in the car park & picnic areas, just not in amongst the fruit.
  They are welcome shelter in our tent while you pick. Water bowl & outside tap by cafe.
  Lovely quiet back roads all around for walking.

• We do our best to avoid excess plastic.
  You can bring along any basket you like to pick into, find the weighing station as you enter our tent,
  stick on the weight and we’ll deduct this at the till.

• All cafe packaging is Vegeware which I recycle right here on the farm,
  including the veggie ‘plastic’ juice cups. Happy/busy compost heap!

• Our eggs come from Sandystones, another local organic farm.

• Flour is from Shipton Mill organic millers.

• I make all the cordial and ice lollies from our own berries - fresh & delicious.
  I did used to make my own ice-cream but couldn’t keep up with demand.
  Now it’s from Mackies Dairy.
  
  Follow us on Facebook and Instagram to make sure you get the very best of our juicy fruit.

  See you soon!
  Harriet
  
  

FIND US

Harriet’s family have farmed Rutherford for nearly 80 years. Berries have been part of our lives since the 1960s when we, along with several other berry growers now gone, supplied a local jam factory.

Harriet runs the cafe and Al the fruit field, along with dozens of other unglamorous jobs that make the operation work smoothly. There’s no bustling office full of admin ready to answer your call/message - generally we’re all in the field, our kids included, serving you.

There are very few fully-outdoor fruit farms left. We stay this way as we’re a busy arable farm for the rest of the year growing wheat, barley, oilseed rape, oats and peas. Al is also a livestock farmer with hill cattle and sheep.

That’s us, the Busy Busbys!