Years ago, a young Devon vet told us he’d been recommending Yeo Valley yogurt to other dairy farms… not for the farmer, but  the calves.

He’d found that a mixture of our Organic Natural Yogurt and milk seemed to be better for them than milk alone. We were intrigued, so, with a bit of spare yogurt at our disposal, we tried it out.

It did seem to do them some good, and now the calves gather round the teats of the feeder to enjoy the drinking yogurt… they do seem to love it.

We’re not vets obviously, but we’ve always felt better for a bit of our tasty yogurt… and it seems our calves do too.

The first events, in March, are Sarah Raven’s full-day courses: The Cutting Garden, and Year Round Veg.

Alys Fowler, Toby Buckland, Bunny Guinness and Jekka McVicar will also be hosting their own talks every month from March to July.

Best of all, every session includes a delicious two-course lunch made with our home-grown produce, and the talks include a guided tour of the Organic Gardens with one of our gardens team.

We’re delighted to welcome such esteemed experts to the valley, especially as each event will help raise funds for Horatio’s Garden, the planned rehabilitation garden at the Duke of Cornwall Spinal Treatment Centre in Salisbury.

Click here for more details and to book your place – numbers are limited, so best book early!

For more about our Organic Gardens, have a look here.

We all feel very privileged as it’s only been a month since we accepted our third Queen’s Award for Enterprise, for Sustainable Development.

Mary has been recognised for her services to sustainable dairy farming, which she began back in 1961 when she and husband Roger moved to Holt Farm in the Yeo Valley.

They had just 35 cows but expanded their herd and sold their first yogurts in 1974.

In 1994, a group of organic dairy farmers approached Mary and son Tim to help find a stable market for their milk. Mary and Tim helped them form The Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative (OMSCo) with the object of pooling together their milk and for us to buy it to make more Yeo Valley yogurts. OMSCo has grown from just six farmers originally to over 300 today, and Yeo Valley still buys milk from about 90 of them in the south west.

Mary has developed an amazing herd of pedigree British Friesians, a black and white breed which is dual purpose, gives quality milk and generally lives a long, healthy life. Demand is now international and bulls from the Lakemead herd are increasingly influential.

Mary says, “I’m completely stunned to receive an OBE… in fact the right word is probably flabbergasted! My family is delighted with the news and I’ve had lots of lovely messages from them.”

Well done Mary – and what a start to the year!

Only 10 companies in the UK had the honour of receiving this award in 2011, and we also won it back in 2001 & 2006.

To get the Sustainable Development award we have to prove our strong commitment to sustainability. So for example, the judges recognised our efforts to reduce our carbon footprint each year as we plugged in more renewable energy and increased our recycling (and the recyclability of our packaging); they also noted our long-term support for British organic dairy farmers and our work in the local rural community.

Lady Gass, Lord Lieutenant of Somerset, presented the award to Yeo Valley’s owner Tim Mead… but there was a second, surprise award on the day too, for our co-founder (and Tim’s mum) Mary Mead

People tend to stay here at Yeo Valley for quite a long time – so much so that we recently celebrated with more than 20 people who’ve each been here for over 25 years. Our gathering of staff and family for the Queen’s Award presentation was a great opportunity properly to thank Mary who, with her husband Roger, started it all here in the valley 50 years ago.

We presented Mary with a lovely framed picture of our valley. She gave a moving speech about the early days of Yeo Valley and how incredibly important sustainable farming and food is, for the land, the animals and other British farmers just like us.

It was a reminder of how far we’ve come since 1961 – but that we’re still on the same path and we plan to be doing this forever.

Here’s to the next 50 years then!

Read a bit more about our values…

Alison’s version of Forever, by our very own boy band The Churned, was the best of hundreds of entries to our Sing in Harmony Facebook competition, and her prize was a cameo appearance in the last airing of our TV ad, during The X Factor final.

Thanks to everyone who entered!

Just in case you’re missing The Churned already, you can watch the ad again here.

Here at Yeo Valley we’ve been planning our Christmas since August! Not just because we love Christmas, but because there is nothing like being prepared – it’s the key to a stress-free Christmas lunch (we also want to make sure we’ll have the right ingredients grown in our garden, or reared on the farm.)

the week before

Spend an hour writing your plan for Christmas lunch… ideally with a mind unclouded by sherry. Decide what time you’re eating, and work back:

• how big is your turkey, and what’s the cooking time? (An hour per kg plus 20 minutes is the general rule)
• cooking time will be from room temperature, so make sure you take your bird out of the fridge as early as possible
• add an extra hour for getting the oven up to temperature
• the bird will need at least 45 minutes to rest after you take it out of the oven
• perfect roast potatoes need 50 minutes, and veg 20 minutes to boil

Christmas Eve

The magical evening, not only because Santa makes his way through the chimneys of the world, finding out who’s been naughty or nice, but because the real magic is happening in your kitchen:

• peel your carrots, parsnips, potatoes and prep your sprouts…  you’ll thank me in the morning because you’ll have time to watch everyone open their presents
• parboil the potatoes for 20 minutes in salted water (it’s not cheating!)
• you can also prepare your pigs in blankets, and if you’re feeling adventurous you could make a chicken stock too
• chill the champagne and wine
• pin your plan to the fridge door

Christmas morning

Crank the oven up to maximum – it will take an hour to come up to temperature, which gives you just enough time for breakfast, then:

• remove the wishbone from the turkey with a small, sharp knife – this makes carving much easier later
• once the oven is up to temperature, wish the turkey well and slide it in
• sear the bird for 30 minutes then turn the oven back down to 180⁰C

Then it’s time for presents, your first glass of bucks fizz and, for me, the first sneaky chocolate before attending to lunch:

• check you’re on schedule, baste your turkey, put the veg into pans, make sure your sauces are on a low heat
• about 20 minutes before the turkey comes out, place a roasting tray with the goose fat in the oven – then toss the parboiled potatoes into it and turn them over until they are coated, season really well and place back into the oven for about 50 minutes
• lift the turkey clear of the roasting pan leaving the juices behind, transfer it to a warmed serving plate and cover with foil while it rests

For perfect gravy:

• heat the juices still in the roasting dish on the hob, bring to a sizzle, add a sprinkling of flour, cook out a little, then add a dash of red wine and your stock, then bring to a simmer stirring all the excess bits of turkey off the bottom of the pan
• reduce over the heat then sieve the gravy in to a jug
• strain your vegetables, lift out your roasties, take all the trimmings out the oven

Transfer the lot to the table, then carve, drink, enjoy.

Jaime Gardener is head chef here at Yeo Valley. If you like these Christmas tips, why not come and visit the valley and try his food for yourself?

If you like the look of this landscape, why not come and have a walk around? Here are some routes to get you started.

We decided to do something positive about it, so to help preserve our rare British varieties we recently held our first Seedy Sunday at our Organic Gardens here in the valley.

We invited some people from the Garden Organic Heritage Seed Library to come and put the case for endangered veg, and show us how to harvest seeds so we can keep growing them…

what’s going on with traditional veg?

A lot of veg today are bred for qualities that suit big commercial growers (for example, short-growing peas that can be harvested easily by machine) – not gardeners at home.

Yes, that means that we can enjoy consistently sweet and tasty peas – but convenience shouldn’t come at the expense of variety… and with it, the spice of life.

why are they worth saving?

British veg varieties are perfectly suited for growing here – as opposed to southern Europe, Africa or Asia where many packet seeds come from.

More importantly though, we run the risk of losing their special characteristics – flavour, colour, shape.

Their names alone make them worth hanging on to: Rent Payer (broad bean), John’s Purple (carrot) and Mortgage Lifter (tomato) among them.

how can you help save Bob & Mary too?

Become a member of the Heritage Seed Library and you can get all sorts of exciting veg varieties to grow at home – and you can save some of the seeds to swap here at our Organic Gardens next year.

Garden Organic brought along lots of these heritage seeds for gardeners to swap for seeds left over from this year, and many people also went home with seeds from our own Organic Garden – Echinacea was a particularly popular swap.

The idea is that more growers plant heritage varieties and, at the end of the season, harvest the seeds to share with more people.

With this in mind, Neil Munro, Heritage Seed Library manager, hosted two lectures on how to harvest seeds from various plants, including tomatoes, so they’re ready to grow next season.

In amongst this horticultural hoe-down there was some delicious food served up in our tea room – the lamb stew from our farms was a big favourite, not to mention the home-made cakes.

gardening lectures & other exciting events next year

The Heritage Seed Library is running another project to preserve seeds from some undocumented ethnic veg they’ve found growing in allotments near their organic gardens in the West Midlands. Here, gardeners are growing plants like Jamaican kalalu, Thai basil, tomatillo and sweet potato for the kitchen that we’ve probably never seen grown in the UK before.

To stay up to date with these projects, and hear more about our 2012 gardening lectures (confirmed speakers include Sarah Raven and Alys Fowler) just sign up for our newsletter.

If you grow your own veg, we’d love to see your pictures on our Facebook page.

If you want to save endangered veg, share this post with your friends.

Here we are: the home of Yeo Valley in Blagdon, Somerset (image source: Google maps)

We’re delighted to announce our new website goes live from today, we hope you like it.

As much as we’d love anyone interested in Yeo Valley to come and visit us here in Blagdon, Somerset to see what we do, we know that’s just not practical for everyone. If you’re interested though, please drop us a note at talk@yeovalleyorganic.co.uk and we’ll be in touch.

Instead, please think of this as a ‘virtual’ throwing open of our doors. Take a look around our new site and let us know what you think.

Over the coming weeks we plan to share news from Yeo Valley here on the pages of our blog and we’ll be talking about what it takes to farm sustainably and why we do it, as well as some behind-the-scenes stories and lots of pictures of what we’re up to. We hope there’ll be something for everyone.

We’d love to hear from you: what would you like to hear more about and what are the questions you’d like answered?

You can reach us @yeovalley on Twitter, on Facebook or if you’d prefer to email, please drop Sally a line at sally@yeovalleyorganic.co.uk.

Next up, a few words about what makes Yeo Valley tick and a quick, guided tour of some of our favourite bits of our brand new site.

Like many of you, we loved last year’s rap stars – but we thought it would be impossible to make a better rap. We’re big X Factor fans (if you haven’t guessed), so now that Gary Barlow is a judge, we thought, what better time for a Yeo Valley boy band?

Meet The Churned: Aiden, Matt, Zak and Bradley. They’ll be singing the new Yeo Valley anthem ‘Forever’ in X Factor ad breaks in the coming weeks.

To us, ‘forever’ means something different than it does to a typical boy band – it’s about sustainable farming and making delicious organic dairy accessible to everyone. What better way to communicate this than through a really catchy song?

Now, here’s the best part. We want you to appear in our ad during the X Factor final.

Visit our Facebook page to sing along with ‘Forever’ and you could win an appearance in our X Factor final ad.

“Let me show you the compost heaps,” said James eagerly. Yes, it’s not just cow-nibbled valleys and teams talking about yogurt at Yeo Valley.

If you venture down to The Organic Garden at Holt Farm, you can visit one of the few organic ornamental gardens in Britain – and its compost heaps.

Laid out almost like a formal garden, there’s an explosion of colour instead of regimented arrays, with everything from stretches of lilac-flowering chives to lettuces picked fresh for the tea room salads – pop in to check out the wolf-whistling gold gnomes on the mirror and the hat-wearing cow, as well as the incredible cakes.

And the garden has been something of a labour of love for Sarah Mead, wife of Yeo Valley supremo Tim. When she inherited it from her mother-in-law around 20 years ago, there were just a few rose beds. But today, she’s transformed it into something both useful and unarguably beautiful.

Like the rest of Yeo Valley, it’s maintained organically, with certification from the Soil Association – so there are biological controls to tackle pests, rather than the usual insecticides found elsewhere.

The lawn might be full of clover, but Sarah says she’s “made peace with the weeds” as it proves just how natural the grass is.

 All the garden waste is recycled and reused in their compost and leaf mould piles (all divided up by type and date in a corner) and any plants brought in come from the UK’s single organic herbaceous nursery or as bare roots to avoid any non-organic soil getting in.

But a lot of thought has gone into its appearance – as well as having practical underfloor heating, the new greenhouse has been designed in thirds to fit with the symmetry of the garden, lining up with the red crab apple trees, explains our guide James, who’s worked there full-time for five years.

And in the Somerset style flowerbed, the willows are surrounded by phacelia, a purple-flowering plant which the bees love. Usually it’s used as green manure, but here it’s been left to flower.

The ‘red and lime bed’ is an explosion of huge red poppies, yellow leafed bushes and foxtail lilies, while the grass bed is scattered with blue irises, with yellow daisies due to flower later.

And one field of bare soil hides the riot of colourful cornflowers and poppies to come, where a sign currently reads: ‘Annual wildflower meadow will be in flower in July. Please come back to see it.’

 One pond’s water is even coloured black using a natural vegetable dye to get the striking reflective effect without harming the wildlife.

But as well as the beautiful array of blooms, the garden is ensuring the survival of several plants, including a local Somerset climbing bean grown by one Bridgwater family for years but never produced commercially.

The garden is working with Ryton Organic Garden to be seed guardians, sending as many seeds from their plants back to the UK’s heritage seed library, so they won’t vanish for good.

:: Seedy Sunday on October 30 will teach people how to get involved with saving seed for the future.
:: Visit www.theorganicgardens.co.uk for opening times

The 3-days of intense rugby training for young people between the ages of 9 and 16 enabled them to improve their skills of the game with the help of specialist coaches. Over the three days, England players Chris Ashton, Matt Banahan and Lee Mears all joined England and Bath player, Olly Barkley, to assist with the coaching and providied huge inspiration to the kids.

The England players also took part in Q&A sessions where the kids were able to ask them any burning questions they had about their careers as rugby players or just life in general – a classic being “Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with?”.

World renound coach, Sir Ian McGeechan also joined the academy on Sunday offering advice and sharing his expertise to the kids.

Between training sessions, the kids enjoyed Yeo Valley yogurts as snacks and Yeo Valley yogurts, ice-cream and frozen yogurt were also offered as a dessert option after lunch every day.

At the end of each day, Olly also demonstrated some quick, easy, and above all, healthy recipes to the kids and their parents as part of the Eat Elektrik programme of which Yeo Valley Organic were the sponsor. All yogurts for these demos was supplied by Yeo Valley as Olly and the Bath team are particularly partial to our yogurt before, during and after training. Demos included a Barks’ Berry Breakfast Smoothie and Hask’s Homemade Burger.

It was great weekend where kids were encouraged to be active and eat healthily.

At the end of the weekend, at least two parents commented that their kids loved our yogurt so much following the academy that they had to go out and buy loads ready for when they got home!!!

For more information about the academy, visit – http://www.elektrik3.com/

But that didn’t stop this year’s festival-goers from having a blast. With more than 180,000 people on the 900 acres, it was certainly one mega party weekend with fantastic music and plenty of other great things to see and do.

Wednesday to Friday saw plenty of rain and with squelching mud over your ankles it gave people no choice but to don their wellies! Walking around the site in all the mud was also an interesting task and you couldn’t stand still for long for fear of getting stuck!!

As we have done for a number of years, this year Yeo Valley Organic were the ‘Official Recycling Sponsors’ of the festival and all festival-goers were given a bag for life as they entered. The bags certainly proved very popular and were seen being used around the festival for most of the weekend.

Our stand was in its usual spot, just down the road to the right of the Pyramid stage, and our Festival Special yogurts and frozen pots were flying over the counter as soon as the gates were open.

Everyone was pleased to see us at the festival for another year, with comments including: “we’re so glad you’re here again and still at just £1!”.

This year’s yogurt flavours were slightly different to the norm with Lemon Curd, Mango & Vanilla and Strawberry. Mango & Vanilla was certainly a winner with lots of people stopping by on their way back to their tents at 8am after a night out!!!

By Saturday, the weather started to dry up and when everyone woke up on Sunday morning, it was like being at a totally different festival.

Reaching 30°C at the height of the day on Sunday, our frozen pots were a massive hit and after being constantly six people deep at the stand for most of the morning, we were sold out by about 2pm. Yogurt sales continued to fly as people opted for something to cool them down in the blazing heat and by Monday we were out of yogurt pots as well.

There were two real highlights of our time at the festival.

The first was the winners of the recent Tractor Factor competition performing at our stand – their prize was four tickets to the festival.

The guys also known as Plough On performed on Thursday and Sunday and were a huge hit with the crowds.

The second highlight was a consumer who appeared at our stand wearing a suit, that his mum had tailored, made out of previous year’s bags for life – what a great idea!!

Overall it was another great festival and with top headline acts of U2, Coldplay and Beyoncé it was certainly one to remember…

To follow Laura on Twitter

For the past three years we have lived like nomads.  Renting a variety of houses, we’ve never had chance to do anything in the garden other than play football, ride scooters and drink wine in the evening sunshine.

Well, now that we know we will be in our current home long term we can do more. With the sunshine finally coming through after what feels like the longest Winter EVER I have decided that we must try to grow some vegetables.

I’ve started by growing tomato seedlings and herbs in yogurt pots on the windowsill.  I’m looking forward to nurturing them and then eating them.  I’ve also started composting.

The 6 year old helped The Husband to clear the front garden at the weekend. As payment he gave her a corner of the garden as her own.  She has lots of soil and a little path into the corner where there is a raised bed and space for her to sit in a chair.

We told her that next weekend we’ll buy some plants and fill her little corner of the garden.  In excitement she raided her money box and, with her 6 year old puppy dog eyes, persuaded me to take her to the garden centre.  With her £6.00 she checked out all the plants, worked out which would be best, and decided on a beautiful lavender.  The lavender is sitting in the corner of the garden waiting to be joined by a plethora of other plants.

The 5 year old who has no interest in gardening spent the weekend collecting worms for the 6 year old’s garden.

Friends have mocked me for my newfound green fingers and I have to admit there is a little voice in my head telling me that I’m going to accidentally kill the basil but I’m giving it a go although I fear the 6 year old will be more successful than me!