Grow your own Christmas dinner

Zoe Chinman, from small poultry farm "East Sussex Smallholders, explains the joy of rearing small batch turkeys on a Sussex smallholding.

- Zoe Chinman

Just outside Brighton, in the market town of Lewes, lies our East  Sussex smallholding. Here, we try to eat mainly our own homegrown produce while teaching key smallholding skills to others. We rear a variety of livestock, including chickens, pork, goat, quail and ducks, all of which provide us with free-range meat throughout the year. We also try to grow as many vegetables as our not-so-green fingers can manage. However, it's at Christmas when rearing our own meat truly makes a difference. We have one tradition that we wholeheartedly recommend: raising extraordinary free-range turkeys. They are a really gentle step into supplying your own meat for the table.

Now into our sixth year, we start the turkey-rearing process as early as February, placing our order for poults with a commercial hatchery, where we buy around 750 day-old turkey chicks. Given the soaring energy costs in recent years, hatcheries now will only set eggs based on the number of orders received, so although this seems early, we need to get our order in. By mid-to-late June, the eggs hatch and at just seven hours old, our tiny turkey chicks are delivered to us in temperature-controlled lorries, arriving in tip-top condition. Every year we get a selection of White, Bronze and Black, and we try to have a different colour on the table from the year before.