our first farm
The Streat Garden
Fifteen acres of South Downs, tended by hand since 2020, and slowly becoming a sanctuary.
the land
A living place, unfolding
Oak woodlands at the edges and fields shaped by generations of hands. The Streat Garden is a small piece of protected South Downs — fifteen acres, quiet under big Sussex skies.
On any given day you'll find no-dig vegetable beds in their seasonal work, heritage hens ranging through the orchard, dairy cows in their paddock, a young forest garden settling into itself, and the steady rhythm of a regenerative smallholding — planting, tending, harvesting, pausing.
It is not finished. It is, deliberately, always becoming. Orchards take years before they fruit. Ponds take seasons to find their ecology. A forest garden is the work of decades. What's here now is what we've built in five years. What's coming is the patient labour of a lifetime.
how we got here
It started with a walk.
In the summer of 2020, like many, the pandemic crystallised something we'd been feeling for years — a quiet unease about the direction of things, and our own place in them.
We kept talking about solutions on long lockdown walks through the city. By autumn, we had sold the idea of certainty and bought fifteen acres of land in the South Downs instead. No farming experience. No grand plan. Just a determination to take back control of how we lived and ate, and a suspicion that others were feeling the same pull.
The first year was humbling. We learned by doing — how to grow from seed, how to tend soil, how to read the land's rhythms. We also hit the reality of smallholding life: it's relentless, expensive, and isolating. Most people who dream of this never get here, and most who do eventually burn out.
So we asked a different question. What if the smallholding was co-owned? What if you could have the food, the connection, and the legacy without the 4am milking or the impossible capital outlay? What if one farm served a hundred households, and a hundred farms served a hundred thousand?
That question became My Little Farm. Our first pioneering founders made the answer possible. The land has become productive. The community is real. The blueprint is working.
And the story is still being written.
what's becoming
Fifteen acres now. A thousand in time.
The Streat Garden isn't the end. It's the beginning.
Fifteen acres has taught us what's possible — what a small piece of protected land can offer when tended with care. The next chapter is much larger: a thousand-acre sanctuary for a thousand households, held in perpetuity, where food, belonging, and the slow rhythm of land-based life meet at scale.
The first farm doesn't disappear as the new estate emerges. It quietens. It deepens. It stays as a protected retreat for the pioneers who helped build it — a working garden, seven days a week, held for generations.
This isn't a commercial venture seeking return. It is a slow-motion transfer of land from speculative ownership into generational stewardship. A different kind of wealth; rooted, shared, and designed to outlast us.
The patient labour of a lifetime. Worth it, we think, for what it leaves behind.
come and see
Come and stand in it
The story is one thing. The place is another.
Book a tour, spend a Saturday, or join us for a seasonal celebration. The land will tell you everything this page couldn't.
Plan your visit →Or, when you're ready to go deeper, explore the membership exchange →
