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MonkeySaurus Acres

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MonkeySaurus Acres

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Luxury camping and huts, based in rural Warwickshire. Reconnect with nature. Part of the Woodland Champions

30/10/2026

The government’s new advice is three days of supplies, since Be Ready launched last week the tins and batteries have seen a lot of interest, and a lot of people have started asking a bigger question: what if the power’s off for three days or more?

Solar on the roof, a battery system, and buildings with fast satellite internet that heat themselves through winter without a wire from the grid. It wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t quick, but it also wasn’t magic, and most of it scales down to a garage or a van, or even just a box you wheel out the cupboard. We started out designing off-grid and portable solar systems around 20 years ago, so we know what’s worth your time and money and what’s not.

We run courses on all this and more: what solar actually gives you in January, how a battery system works and what it costs, what you can and can’t run off it, keeping water and sanitation going when the taps and the flush don’t, and the portable kit worth having for a short outage. Hands-on, four people at a time, here on the farm. If you’d rather talk through your own set-up, we also do advice and design anywhere in the UK. We don’t do installs.

Drop us a message or see the website for details.

29/10/2026

Free laundry detergent, courtesy of the horse chestnut trees.

Conkers are packed with saponins, the same natural detergent found in soap nuts. Chop them up while they’re fresh, dry them in a dehydrator or low oven until they snap, and jar them up. They’ll keep for a couple of years.

When you want to wash your clothes, soak a big handful in a litre of warm water for a few hours, strain, and use about 150ml per load. It foams gently, cleans lightly soiled clothes well, and is kind on wool and skin. It won’t shift heavy grease on its own, so keep the proper stuff for muddy overalls, but for everyday laundry it does the job.

It’s probably your last chance to collect them now while they’re still on the ground and do the chopping before they go too hard, and you’ve got laundry sorted for a while.

If you fancy going a step further, we run soap making courses here at MonkeySaurus, including the traditional method of leaching lye from wood ash and turning it into soap with tallow or olive oil, whichever you prefer, we use herbs and ingredients found here to add to the soap, including rosemary, lavender, mint, oats, szechaun (tingly!), beeswax, honey… proper old-school, nothing bought in, and you take home what you make. Drop us a message if you’re interested.

27/10/2026

Learn how best to select ingredients, grind whole spices, cook up big batches of food and then preserve it by canning, fermenting and pickling. See the website for more details.

27/10/2026

A little look at what’s inside and around our shepherds hut. Come stay with us and reconnect with nature.

26/10/2026

Three things from the farm you are very unlikely to find in a supermarket.

Medlars. The fruit you eat when it looks like it's gone off. You pick them hard in late October, leave them somewhere cool until they go brown and soft (bletting), and then they taste like spiced apple butter. Medieval England ate them by the barrow load. They vanished because nothing that has to sit and go soft with a variable window before it's ready will ever survive a supply chain.

Chicory. Most people know it as that blue flower on the verge in summer. The roots roast into a coffee substitute, the leaves are a bitter salad, and the taproot goes down a metre and breaks up our clay better than any tool we own. The bees are on the flowers from June to September. One plant, four jobs.

Szechuan pepper. Not related to black pepper, and not hot the way chilli is. Chilli burns because capsaicin tells your mouth it's on fire. Szechuan pepper does something else entirely - a compound in the husk makes your lips and tongue buzz and tingle, like a very mild electric current, which is why the Chinese call it "ma", numbing. Put the two together and you get the famous "ma la" of proper Sichuan cooking. It grows as a hardy shrub that shrugs off a Midlands winter.

None of these are hard to grow. None of them get sprayed, dug, or fussed over. They sit in the orchard among the fruit trees, the bees and the ducks, each doing a job for the others - shade, pollen, roots, mulch - and we mostly just turn up and harvest. That's what a food forest is for: a system that looks after itself, so the work goes down every year while the food goes up.

If you'd like to see how it fits together, our permaculture and food forest course walks you round all of this and finishes with cooking some of it. Details at monkeysaurus.co.uk, link in the comments.

25/10/2026

Same barber.

This is Frank. Alpacas aren't cuddly - they don't want a hug and they'll tell you so - but they are curious, a bit vain and very good company on a walk, as long as you let them set the pace and stop every twenty yards for a mouthful of hedge.

The curiosity does occasionally get the better of him. Last summer he put his head in a bucket to see what was in it, and the bucket came with him. He didn't panic, didn't run, didn't make a sound. He just stood there, perfectly still, wearing it like a hat, until I wandered over and took it off. Third photo. Nobody has been allowed to forget it.

An hour round the farm with one of them on a halter is the best way to understand why people end up keeping these things. It's also the only way to get a photo where they look like they're smiling.

Alpaca walking introductions run all year. An hour, £40 a person, up to four people at a time so everyone gets their own animal. Details at monkeysaurus.co.uk.

24/10/2026

I write this as my neighbour just messaged me with a photo of a pumpkin they’ve left for me on the doorstep, last year I turned that obscenely large pumpkin into a variety of hot sauces that were a real highlight of the autumn for me and people who came to visit. The new pumpkin will endure the same delicious fate!

Late October is the busiest the kitchen gets, and almost none of it involves cooking. The apples are pressed and the c***r's in the demijohns, blipping away through the airlocks. This year's chillies have gone into a hot sauce mash that'll ferment for a few weeks before it gets blended. The last of the cabbage is salted down as kraut, and there's a jar of fire c***r steeping with our own honey for when the coughs start.

None of it needs a fridge, a freezer or electricity. Salt, time and the right bacteria have been keeping food safe for a few thousand years longer than clingfilm has, and the flavours you get are ones a supermarket can't sell you, because they're still changing in the jar.

It's also the cheapest way there is to save a glut of hard worked produce for the winter. A sack of windfalls becomes twenty litres of c***r. A kilo of chillies becomes a year of hot sauce.

If you want to learn how, the fermentation and preserving course and the hot sauce masterclass run all year, and you go home with jars you made. Details at monkeysaurus.co.uk.

23/10/2026

Why not share in some of the happiness too?

23/10/2026

Why grow food the hard way?

Modern farming is brilliant at one thing: producing a lot of a few crops, cheaply. But a field of one plant is a field with a great weakness. The same pest, the same disease, the same wet summer hits every plant at once. Nearly every banana you've ever eaten is a single clone, and it's currently losing a fight with a fungus.

The other cost is quieter. A huge amount of food just can't be grown at that scale, or won't survive the lorry, so it's quietly dropped off the menu. W**e cap mushrooms that are past their best in two days. Mangelwurzels, once in every field round here, now barely seen. Good King Henry, a brilliant leafy green nobody's heard of. Sea kale, mulberries, skirret, fresh-picked peas eaten the same hour - a whole larder you'll never taste unless you grow it yourself, or visit somewhere that does.

That's what permaculture and food forest design is about here. Lots of different plants and animals supporting each other, so no single failure takes the lot. And it all starts with the soil - the photo is three tests from three corners of the farm, and they're all different, which is exactly why you design for the ground you've actually got.

Next year we're running a permaculture design course where you bring a sketch and a jar of your own soil and leave with a plan for your plot. Shown in pictures, soil PH testing using home made solution from purple cabbage! Full course list at monkeysaurus.co.uk

12/10/2025

A small snack for the bantams that roam around 🥰 - the chicks are growing but still so tiny!

Address

19 High Street
Marton
CV239RR

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 10pm
Tuesday	8am - 10pm
Wednesday	8am - 10pm
Thursday	8am - 10pm
Friday	8am - 10pm
Saturday	8am - 10pm
Sunday	8am - 10pm

Telephone

+447923361384

Website

http://www.monkeysaurus.co.uk/

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