Chippy Flower Farm
Through the summer months, Chippy Flower Farm at Little Tew opens its fields for pick-your-own, scissors and basket in hand among whatever's blooming that week.
Through the summer months, Chippy Flower Farm at Little Tew opens its fields for pick-your-own, scissors and basket in hand among whatever's blooming that week.
Chippy Flower Farm sits just outside Little Tew, which is barely a lane's width from Ledwell, and it has become one of our favourite ways to spend a summer morning from the cottage. It's a small, naturally grown cut-flower farm, and through the warmer months they open a patch of it for pick-your-own. You wander the rows with a pair of snips and a bucket, cutting whatever has come into flower that week. There's something genuinely restorative about it, and it's the kind of simple afternoon that tends to stay with you longer than you'd expect.
Because it's a real working flower farm rather than an attraction, it runs on the season's rhythm rather than a fixed calendar. The pick-your-own patch typically opens across the summer, roughly June to September, and there's no set list of what you'll find on any given visit. That's half the pleasure. Early on you might cut sweet peas, cornflowers, larkspur and bishop's flower; by late summer the beds fill with dahlias, cosmos, rudbeckia, grasses and amaranth. The colours shift week by week, so no two visits ever look quite the same.
How it worksYou don't need to book. Through the season the patch is generally open on set days across the week during daytime hours, and you simply arrive, pay at the hut on the way in, and they'll lend you a bucket or a jar and some snips to cut with. Prices work by the container rather than the stem, so you fill your vessel with whatever catches your eye. There are smaller cups and children's jam jars alongside the full buckets, which makes it an easy thing to do with little ones. Exact days, hours and prices do change from season to season, so it's always worth a quick look at their channels before you set off.
One thing worth knowing: this is a growing patch, not an endless field, so from time to time they close it for a day or two to let the flowers recover and come back. If you're making a special trip of it, a quick call or a glance at their Instagram the night before saves any disappointment.
It's a five-minute drive from Well Cottage, or a genuinely lovely walk through the fields if the weather's kind. We'd suggest going earlier in the day, before the heat sets in and while the flowers are at their freshest. Bring a container you actually like the look of, because these flowers are at their best arranged loosely rather than perfectly, and they tend to look wonderful in whatever you carried them home in. The cottage kitchen table does the rest, and a jug of cornflowers and sweet peas transforms the place.
There's a rhythm to it that suits a slow Cotswold week. You can fold it in with a wander around Little Tew, a coffee in Chipping Norton, or an afternoon on one of the walks from the door. Alongside the pick-your-own, the farm also runs seasonal workshops and sells ready-cut bunches and buckets, so even outside the picking window there's often a reason to stop by. Their own channels are the place to check what's on.
“We go every couple of weeks through the summer. The cottage ends up full of flowers, and the whole ritual of choosing and cutting them is half the point.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.