Lay of the Land
A peat-free family nursery in the Yorkshire Dales with a café to feed and a market garden to build — and, since August, one of the first UK sites running the Aftrak tractor.
Who they are
Lay of the Land is a family nursery, garden centre and café on the edge of Settle, in the Yorkshire Dales. The Lay family started it in spring 2012. Andrew and James Lay run it now, with around ten people across the business, and they grow a good deal of what they sell.
They have been peat-free for ten years — as far as they know, the first garden centre in the area — and grow to organic principles. Not a switch forced by a supplier deadline, but a decision taken early and then made to work, on their own plants, every season since.
Most of the growing happens a few miles up the A65 at Austwick: two polytunnels, eight metres by thirty, about 480 square metres under cover, on gravel standing ground. It is an exposed hillside with thin stony topsoil over heavy clay.
What they’re building
The café is why the ground matters. Andrew and James want to grow all of the food the café and restaurant cook and sell — not a token herb bed, but a working market garden: outdoor vegetables and salad, root crops, soft fruit and top fruit. Everything on the plate raised on the same peat-free ground as the plants they sell.
Almost none of it exists yet. The growing areas have to be made first, and on this site that means breaking pasture on a slope, through thin stony topsoil into heavy clay. At present the only way to do it is to hire in a digger and an operator.
What it does here
Lay of the Land is one of the first sites in the country running an Aftrak micro electric tractor — a small battery-powered machine the operator walks alongside. It was delivered on Wednesday 19 August 2026.
There is one machine on the holding today: a loader, used mostly for shifting compost. No tractor, no powered transport. A forklift was tried for pallets and rejected because it would not travel on the gravel — which sets the constraint everything else has to meet. Grass cutting, digger work and trenching are hired in.
Four jobs:
- Breaking new ground for the market garden — beds and paths, made once and made properly.
- Moving potted stock. Potted in the tunnels, stood for a fortnight, then carried out by hand, pot by pot. The biggest labour sink on the site, and it peaks in March to May when labour is scarcest.
- Grass cutting, with collection. Hired in with an operator at present. The clippings need to come off the field, not be mulched back in, to take the fertility down for a wildflower planting.
- Moving materials and arisings while weeding and clearing. Currently barrows and tub trucks.
“We can make them whatever we want”
Built around the machine
Because the beds do not exist yet, nothing is fixed. "We can make them whatever we want," they told us — so bed width and path centres can be set to the machine before anything is dug. Their window for breaking ground runs from September to February, and the machine arrived a fortnight ahead of it.
They also want to run their water pumps from Aftrak batteries and panels rather than the grid.
Heavy clay under thin stony topsoil, on a slope, in Dales weather, is about as hard as ground gets for a walk-behind machine in this country. And there is something fitting about the first job being this one — cutting the beds for a garden that feeds the café next door.
Andrew and James were also keen to stock the tractor themselves and demonstrate it at Settle.
Aftrak at Settle
The tractor has been working at Settle since August 2026, with three attachments: a rotavator for breaking ground, a cutter bar for grass, and a trailer for shifting what the other two leave behind.
Between them they take on work that was hired in with an operator — the mowing, and the digger brought in to break new ground.
The meadow comes down with the cutter bar, and the grass leaves the field on the trailer. The second half matters as much as the first: the clippings have to come off to bring the fertility down for a wildflower planting, and mulching them back in would undo it.
One machine, one attachment swapped for the other, and a job that used to need a contractor.
Breaking the ground
The market garden is being cut into pasture on the slope, and because the beds are being made from nothing they are set to the machine rather than the other way round — bed widths and path centres decided before anything is dug.
That is the ground the café's vegetables will come out of, on the same peat-free principle as the plants the nursery sells.
Aftrak is a recipient of funding through the DRIVE35 Mobilise competition, delivered by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade with the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK, Zenzic and Innovate UK. Site details from visits of 5 and 19 August 2026.
layoftheland.co.uk →