Despite having a day off on Friday we didn’t get much work done this weekend. Some of our friends had booked the Farmhouse to surprise me and so we spent the weekend entertaining them in the local area instead – far more interesting!! Dalwood Vineyard is an award-winning vineyard in one of our local villages and runs a [dog-friendly] tour and wine tasting, which we took them to. We’ve been twice before and had a great time, and we weren’t disappointed this time either. The vineyard was the brainchild of the local skittles team who were inspired hearing that the Romans used to grow vines on that hill and decided to recreate it! Mike and Jo ran our tour – Mike is one of the original pub skittle team members and does the tours in his free time. The wine is absolutely delicious – they’ve just brought out a new sparkling wine that we got to try as well.
We walked back through Horner Hill, one of the Stockland turbaries – common land for the parishioners where historically they could graze their livestock and collect peat and firewood for free. A lot of effort goes into maintaining the turbaries – the woodland offers lovely shade on a hot day (compared to walking on the lanes) and you catch glimpses of the view across the valley when the trees open up. It was a lovely walk back – listening to the bird song as we went. And of course we stopped at The Kings Arms for dinner as well – it would be rude not to!
We also visited two other places with them – the first was Daisy’s Dairy, our local milk vending machine shed that has an amazing array of milkshake flavours to try. The cherry, red velvet and a mix of raspberry and white chocolate went down particularly well. Daisy’s Dairy is just down the road from us, and several of our guests have been there. We include a bottle of their milk in our welcome pack for guests, and they sell our jam from their vending machine – it’s great to be able to support each other!
And then we went to one of our local farm shops Barleymows, which is the first time I’ve been there even though it’s only a few miles away. They have a lovely range of goods – plenty of cheese and meat, deli items, chutneys and jams, and ciders, although my favourite was their range of toy tractors! We keep saying we’ll try their restaurant as we’ve heard great things about it… one day!
It hasn’t been all rest and relaxation this week though! We’ve had a lovely review from our previous guests who were staying to celebrate a birthday – which is always lovely to read. We now got 13 reviews on cottages.com and are very grateful to our guests for leaving them, particularly given the effort many of them have to go to! John has been making improvements to the Farmhouse as well – adding a tray of popcorn into the Games Room for guests who want to watch a film, and adding QR codes to the jam and chutney signs to make it easier for guests to pay as they go (until now we’ve asked for card or cash payments at the end of their visit). Using the Farmhouse ourselves this weekend has also been really useful – we spotted that the new dishwasher didn’t have enough height for both plates and glasses and so removed the cutlery shelf to create more room; and we spotted a couple of extra utensils that we’ll add as well. One of John’s regular jobs is to sort through guests recycling and separate it into the correct boxes, so he’s created new clearer signs to try and reduce the number of times he has to do this!
We did find time to work through some of our garden jobs too – the hot weather means the grass has grown incredibly fast so John’s been prioritising mowing these and keeping them looking neat. I planted our final dahlias out into pots – the first ones we planted are starting to grow so once these start to bloom we’ll move them up to the Farmhouse. We’re way behind our planting plan and have seedlings that need both planting out and potting on, as well as seeds that need to be planted too. I potted up our tomato, cucumber and most of our squash/pumpkin seedlings, and started getting some of our flower seedlings out too. It looks like a rabbit has found its way into our kitchen garden as our lettuce and chard is looking severely munched, so we’ve temporarily covered them with netting until we can repair our vegetable bed covers (the hinges rusted and won’t move now). We’ve had quite a lot of slug damage too already and are trying beer traps to limit this. If only the animals would eat weeds instead of our vegetables, they’d be so much more welcome!!
Ley Farm Cottages 