One of our first ‘Big Jobs of 2025’ jobs was to clear the ivy from the wall between our kitchen garden and orchard. Most of the old walls around the garden are covered in ivy – we’re keeping a lot of it as our wrens love hiding in it, and the berries are a great source of winter food for the birds. This wall is particularly frustrating though as it houses the multitudes of snails that sneak into our kitchen garden and greenhouse and eat everything. And it’s also taking over our strawberry drainpipes, stopping the strawberries from growing.
Well – with a day off on Boxing Day we decided not to wait until the new year. Instead we spent the day clearing the ivy back – it must have been there for years, the stems were so thick. We still need to dig a few stems out of the ground, they weren’t easy to pull out! It’s really opened up the space around the back of the greenhouse too, which we’re aiming to pave before it’s time to get our temporary greenhouse out, to create a flatter and more suitable space than the current sloped gravel. The wall itself will need to be rebuilt in places where the ivy buried itself in the mortar and pulled it apart, which hopefully our neighbour’s dad will be able to fix up for us in the Spring.
We also created a new section on our website to give prospective guests some ideas about what they can do while staying at Ley Farm Cottages. We spent some time researching different places to visit and, while the section is still somewhat work in progress and we have more nearby attractions to add, we wanted to get the first few pages published. We’ve started off with information about the various beaches along the local Jurassic Coast, some of the local foodie places, various historic houses and gardens, and miscellaneous nearby attractions. We’ve noticed that over half of our guests bring their dogs so we’ve marked dog-friendly attractions so that it’s easier to plan a visit. It’s been interesting to see just how many places let you bring a well-behaved dog. It’s also made us realise just how little we know our local area, so we’ve set ourselves a goal to visit a few places each year.
Our Christmas guests left on Friday, luckily our New Year guests weren’t arriving until Saturday so we had a bit more time to complete the changeover. Our guests had left two more lovely comments in our guest book, we’re hoping they will also leave us a 10/10 review on Cottages.com to help our ratings. We’ve had 10 reviews across AirBnB, Cottages.com and Booking.com so far – and we had our first 9/10 rating on Booking.com recently. While it’s still a great rating, it’s unexpectedly disappointing to have lost our 10/10 status so soon, and the review and guest book comment unfortunately didn’t point to what would have made it a 10. It’s made us think more about what we could do to exceed our future guests’ expectations.
We did manage to chill on Christmas Day, making the most of the opportunity to walk around our local area. Evie in particular loved jumping in the muddy puddles, which gave us a chance to try out our dog shower too! I don’t get to walk much at the moment and it’s a great way to remember why we moved here and rejuvenate our efforts to create an amazing space for our guests. I was also pretty chuffed with the fact that we managed to grow most of our Christmas Day vegetables in the garden, including one massive parsnip and some decent sized turnips and brussels sprouts. This year hasn’t been a great year for the garden and this is only the second year of successfully growing parsnips so to have enough for us to eat a meal (and some left over) was surprisingly rewarding!
Ley Farm Cottages 
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