We’ve made more progress in the games room this week – our aim is to get it finished and onto our listing by the end of November so we can attract more guests. We’ve already got the first few school holidays booked up but nothing yet for summer, which is making us a little nervous. The curtains arrived this week, so we put up the final pole and hung the curtains. They aren’t quite chink-free despite leaving lots of room around the apertures, but it shouldn’t ruin people’s viewing if they decide to watch a film and there’s daylight outside. John’s washed all the building dust off the walls, hoovered and built the second DVD rack too. The projector is connected to the wifi so guests can access their own TV subscriptions, however we wanted to leave options too. We’ve spent many a wet evening in a holiday cottage watching old movies!
Although Saturday was a bit drizzly, we spent most of it in the orchard and kitchen garden, gradually tidying them up ready for winter. We’ve sorely neglected them this year as we focused on getting our house ready and then the farmhouse and downstairs of the New Barn done and ready to rent. We picked the remaining fruit (a small crop of medlars) and took down the runner bean canes which actually did well despite planting them late. We tidied up the brussels sprouts and kalettes, staking them to support them as the crop hopefully grows. We prepped the onion bed with last year’s leaf mulch so it’s ready for planting, which we’ll do once we have spare chicken wire to protect them. The squirrels and mice have done so much damage this year, we need to upgrade our protection!!! And we started raking up the leaves in the orchard to create next year’s mulch – much to the dog’s delight as she kept hiding her ball in the piles and dispersing the leaves as she dug for it…! If we can put in enough effort now, we’re hoping next year might just be a better year.
The Farmhouse has been busy this week – we said goodbye to last weekend’s guests who were here for a long weekend on Tuesday, welcomed another group on Friday for the weekend and then had a same-day changeover as our latest guests arrived on Sunday afternoon for a week. John did the first changeover during the week and took the opportunity of a few clear days to clean the outside of the Farmhouse windows too. We’re starting to get into a routine with the cleaning now so today’s changeover only took us five hours – the laundry drags on throughout the week though with at least four beds to wash and iron.
We’ve tried out a new chutney recipe – this time an apple and cider one. It’s taken hours to boil off enough liquid (not the 30 minutes the recipe says!) but has really darkened and is looking delicious. It sounds a bit more exciting than apple chutney and will be exciting to see how this sells once we’ve left it a while for the flavour to mature.
Ley Farm Cottages 