It turns out that weekend same-day changeovers are easier to manage alongside work than Friday changeovers, but it does limit the number of jobs we can get through across the rest of the weekend. It’s good being able to help John rather than leave most of the hard work to him (which is what happens when we have a weekday break between bookings). It’s nice getting the house ready to give our guests the best holiday possible. This week since it’s half term, we had an excuse to get out all the new games and toys we brought for our younger guests (although I suspect this week the toys may be a little too young for them).
Sunday’s job was cleaning out our new greenhouse and attempting to rid the chilli plants of aphids. Although I’ve never seen one of the lacewing larvae we bought, the number of aphids did drop for a while. I’ve moved the few ladybirds I’ve spotted into the greenhouse and put the ladybird house in there too, but the aphids have started to come back again, and the leaves previously attacked by the aphids have started to grow black soot mould. So this weekend we took all the plants out, cleaned the shelves and swept the greenhouse. Then we chopped off all the infected leaves and sprayed the remaining ones to wash off the remaining aphids. We also replaced the wonky shelves with a new set – we’d temporarily used parts of the plastic greenhouse damaged last year until we knew it would work with shelves on both sides. Now we have a clean greenhouse that’s hopefully aphid-free and strong chilli plants that can be overwintered to save growing new ones next year.
John has managed to dodge the rain this week and get through a few more garden jobs. He’s taken the runner beans down – despite planting them very late in the season we still succeeded in growing a few kilos. And he’s been busy picking more apples from the orchard. We’re lucky to have several cooking and dessert apple trees that are ready at different times throughout the autumn – so as one tree finishes, another one is ready to pick. It means we have an ongoing task to cut up and freeze the cooking apples ready for use later in the season, as our garage is too warm to keep them in the rack over the winter.
One good thing about wet autumn days is the volume of rainbows we get. They’re better from the Farmhouse as you’re that bit higher and the rainbows are usually full arcs that stretch right across the valley. Even from lower down they’re still bright and colourful. A good excuse to stop what you’re doing for a moment and just watch them before they disappear!
Unfortunately our wifi in the Shippon has been down since Wednesday after one of the local farmers managed to clip the cable when hedge cutting (the cable had been sagging since a tree fell on it earlier in the year and stretched it so wasn’t as high as it should have been). This also means there’s no connection in the Games Room so our guests are having to make do with DVDs – lucky we kept a selection in there! Weirdly the Farmhouse and our neighbours are still connected despite running from the same wire – the Openreach engineers think that their connections are still attached in the fraying part of the cable. You don’t realise how much you rely on the internet until you don’t have it – especially when working from home; but our neighbours are super lovely and letting me work from their house on Monday. We’re just hoping it gets fixed before the cable gets any worse and the Farmhouse loses connection too…
Ley Farm Cottages 