Sally Cave – Nurse to Farmer

John Nash is a retired, well sort of retired, fruit farm manager in Kirdford who enjoys scribbling about life on the farm from the now to days gone by.

Hi, my dear friends,

I’d like to tell you about a lovely lady I know.

It’s a story that needs telling, about the courage and determination of a person who was thrown into a position that was a long way from the life that she had envisaged lay before her…

Sally Cave has owned and run Costrong Fruit Farm for the last 42 years. However, it was not the profession that she started her working life with.

Sally trained as a nurse. Starting to learn her craft at the prestigious Guys Hospital in London, she rapidly gained experience in maternity, paediatrics and finally oncology nursing. She worked for the RAF during their involvement at The King Edward VII hospital over at Midhurst, specialising in the oncology wards, where she gained the love of so many patients and the respect of the doctors who she worked with. This work was acknowledged with a Commendation issued by the Air Officer Commanding Chief, RAF.

In 1980 she married Colonel AH Cave, MBE who owned and ran Costrong Farm in Kirdford. Sadly, he died two years later and Sally was left with a terrible dilemma. Let the farm be sold and her husband’s dreams be lost, or continue with the effort he had poured into making the farm an example of modern growing. She decided to continue.

She asked me if I would continue as the farm’s manager, and I’m so pleased that I agreed to stay, a decision I’ve never once regretted.

It meant her leaving the comfort of the skills she knew so well, and acquiring a knowledge of a whole new venture in a very fast learning curve though, I should add, she did now and then return to hospital life by giving lectures to young nurses at the training hospitals in London, passing on the knowledge of so many years of devoted service.

To show how quickly she was accepted by her fellow growers in the fruit world can be demonstrated by the fact that just two years later she was invited to become an Associate Member of the Institute of Horticulture. The fruit growing community is a tight knit group, and this invitation shows the respect fellow growers felt for the contribution she had made to the industry in such a short time.

She became the Secretary of the West Sussex Fruit Group and a Director of Kirdford Growers –the oldest fruit cooperative in the country.

The farm’s shop ran seven days a week, with the glasshouses producing salad crops, raspberries and strawberries, a range of bedding and pot plants, as well as grapes, figs and peaches as the seasons allowed.

We were exceedingly proud for several years, supplying early strawberries to Buckingham Palace for its garden parties. (They had to be picked with two inch long strigs so they could be eaten with white gloves on.)

40 varieties of apples and pears came from the orchards, building to a total of between 250300 tons of fruit a year. This huge crop needed the wonderful help of so many village folk who attended the harvest for so many years.

In so many of those years Sally became a familiar figure at harvest time, wandering the orchards chatting with the pickers, paying them their wages, and discussing their problems. At the end of each season she arranged the wonderful pickers party where a spit-roast lamb and flowing wine would celebrate another year at the farm.

Sadly those wonderful orchards have now gone. Just a few ancient trees remain to mark the passing of a way of life that so many enjoyed for so many generations.

The farm still goes on though. The usual mountain of paper to wade through as red tape must always be dealt with.

Now in her 90th year there was no way Sally was going to let the demise of the fruit industry in our area stop her determination to keep Costrong Farm going. Now sheep roam the meadows and a local nursery uses the glasshouses to grow plants for garden centre sales. Nursing Sister to Farmer. Two so very different ways of life. Respect!

John Nash