Doing our bit – in between our off-peak routine jobs

It’s been a quiet week for us this week – with a weekend visiting friends and a mid-week work trip making a dent in our available time. We’re now firmly into weekend bookings in the Farmhouse (this weekend hosting the third 60^th birthday in a row and another in a fortnight’s time!) which has allowed us to get into an ‘off peak’ weekly routine of a Monday changeover and 2 days of washing and ironing. Then John spends the rest of the week doing a major upkeep job in the Farmhouse, keeping on top of the lawn care and fitting in a few seasonal gardening jobs. This week though one of the days was taken up mowing the church grounds in Yarcombe along with one of our neighbours further up the valley. As soon as we moved to Devon we realised that in such a small community, it’s so important to get involved – otherwise a few people end up doing everything and it’s unmanageable. Plus it’s a good opportunity for him to catch up with our neighbour who he doesn’t get to see often otherwise!!

This week’s major job was to deep clean the Farmhouse and New Barn windows inside and outside – including behind the glass balustrades which John had to do from outside on a ladder with the doors wide open. It’s a job that certainly helps to build up your arm muscles having to hold the pole for so long!

We’ve spent the rest of the week continuing to prep our orchard fruit. It feels like we’re keeping on top of the harvest a bit better than previous years – all our stone fruits are now frozen ready to jam later on, and we’ve used up the rest of our early pears. This week we moved onto our quinces – with the first batch of membrillo boiling right now.

We’ve invested a lot of time over the last few weeks in updating our cooking tracker spreadsheet where we record everything we’ve made, what ingredients we used and where we’ve sold the produce. We regularly check the fruit that’s in store and record any issues as part of our 5 star food hygiene rating. Until recently we just recorded our produce in batches which made it much harder to work out what we’d sold where – now we record every individual jar which is more work upfront but a lot easier to track to the point of sale. We still need to think about where to sell our chutneys and jellies as these don’t sell as well as our jams, and not all of our fruit can be made into jam. We keep talking about going to a farmer’s market but never seem to have a free weekend day. One day!