The crowning moment of this week has to be when the table football arrived and was installed in the games room for our guests. John has wanted to get one for months but I wasn’t convinced – the room had a good amount of space as it was without feeling cramped, and we want to keep the area flexible to accommodate corporate teambuilding events as a future potential opportunity in the low season. He was so determined though – he drew a few different room layouts and then tested one out in the room itself using masking tape to show where the table football would go. He even created a business case to show how long it would take to pay back based on our current guest stays. I finally agreed – and as soon as John told one of our guests we were getting a table football, we had a repeat booking come through from them the following day! So when it arrived this week John was over the moon. Annoyingly the rods weren’t lubricated enough but he managed to fix this with an online order of lubricant – although he did have to take the table apart as well. Our guests have already been enjoying using it!
We’ve had a couple of days off this weekend with various family members, but managed to carve out a bit of time on Bank Holiday Monday to get some work done. John and his dad picked our first proper harvest of damsons, now in our industrial fridge ready to be jammed immediately or frozen until we have sufficient apples ready in a month or so’s time. We always put apple in our jams now after a disastrous batch of damson-only jam that was so hard we couldn’t even get the spoon in! We’ve found that adding apples makes the jam that bit softer and easier to eat – apples have less pectin than damsons and it’s the pectin that helps the jam to set. Although it does mean we have to wait for them to be ready as the seasons don’t quite align.
I also got a step further in finishing off our new greenhouse set-up, by digging a flower border around two sides of it. Our intention is to plant flowers that attract pollinators throughout the season, which will hopefully then pop into the greenhouse and pollinate whatever is growing in there. For the most part it’ll be housing chilli plants but perhaps there’ll be room for something else too! It was pretty difficult digging the border with the dry weather we’ve had (stony soil isn’t great at the best of times but certainly not after a very dry spell when the soil is rock-hard) so we just managed to have time to fill the border with compost. Planting the flowers will need to wait until next weekend…
Ley Farm Cottages 