Cynefin farm is a 7 acre site deep in the North Pembrokeshire national park, south west Wales. It is a wild and wonderful place to be, and has an unusual and locally infamous history.

After an early beginning as a sheep farm, from the late 1950’s to early 1990’s it became a spectacular and successful garden centre and tree nursery, and the extensive glasshouses (now mostly derelict) are from that time. When the owner retired however, the site had a change of use and became an equally popular and successful brothel and nudist campsite, with the largest glasshouse now housing a hot tub, mini bar and some locally still well remembered all night parties. The owners from this time were eventually chased out of town and from the late 1990’s the land, greenhouses and gardens have mostly been left to go wild, with only the house being occupied.

My family and I arrived here in November 2019 and were struck by the wild beauty of the land (if not a little daunted by the sheer amount of restoration and broken glass to tackle with). Something about the land spoke to us - it had been so damaged by human activity - but here was nature claiming it back, and it felt like we could work alongside her to bring the land back to something incredible for both humans and wildlife to live alongside each other. We’ve spent a large amount of time since then restoring the largest glasshouse, spending our time underneath the old tangles of grapes, passionfruit, figs and apricots, doing our best to bring them back into health and productivity, slowly transforming the glasshouse into an indoor forest garden classroom.

The 4ish acres of pasture was very degraded - compacted, overgrazed and bare in many places, with fragments of rubbish everywhere. After a long winter collecting every scrap from the bare soil (all visitors during this time will remember being given a bucket and a pair of wellies upon arrival) we set about reseeding the bare patches with diverse cover crops. This deepened and improved our top soil, whilst increasing biodiversity and feeding the pollinators. We also brought in a small small flock of Shetland sheep for mob grazing our struggling pasture, in combination with a mobile chicken house. We also planted thousands of native, edible and medicinal plants and trees in windbreaks, forest garden and coppice plantations, and have developed no-dig annual gardens.

Five years in we still have a very long way to go, but seeing the wildflower meadow improve year by year is astonishing and shows us that we’re on the right track. We’ve been helped along the way by pigs and goats (both fantastic for bramble clearing) and have now replaced all of them (including our escape-artist-tree-eating sheep) with a couple of carefully managed ponies, who are providing us with great manure for our gardens and who we plan to integrate into farm work more over the coming years.

We could never have done this alone and many volunteers have helped us along the way. This winter our focus is on developing our program of community gatherings, planting our forest garden areas and building a small wood fired sauna to get us all through the wild welsh winters.