We had friends over this weekend so didn’t have time to start one of our more significant jobs. We did however get a few smaller things done – starting with putting non-slip outdoor matting down in the orchard on the path between the Farmhouse and the Games Room in the New Barn. Before, the path just went down onto grass to the bottom of the steps, but with all the recent rain it’s getting quite muddy and slippery and we don’t want anyone to fall over. Longer-term we want to extend the brick path that runs from the Farmhouse but until then the matting should make the area safer. It looks a little unsightly so hopefully the grass will grow through soon!
And we dug out a new flower bed. When we come up with new ideas we try them out on a temporary basis for a year first, before putting in a more permanent solution if it worked. This year we tried growing sweet peas up our kitchen garden stone wall that we had restored at the start of the year. I grew them in flower pots that were perched on stones and kept falling over (the hill is quite steep along that area). That combined with the weight of the plants dragged down the netting I’d put over the wall. Despite all that the location was a success and we had loads of lovely flowers so we decided to make a more permanent solution by digging a proper flower bed. It’s been on our list to do this side of winter so we could plant the sweet pea seeds now – I read that planting sweet peas now gives them strong roots, and planting in the spring produces lots of growth so we’re going to try both!
We’ll weight the netting down on the other side of the wall as well – we have some long bits of wood that will be surplus to requirements once we’ve laid our patio that should do the job nicely. We even managed to find a use for the picket fence left over from doing the Farmhouse front garden – just a shame we don’t have a bit more. There’s no point buying another pack though as then we’d end up with even more leftover pieces and would need to find a new project!
We had our first midweek booking this week so John spent Friday doing most of the changeover. I’ve still got to change the beds but I have a little bit more time until our next guests arrive on Friday. Our guests have already left us a lovely review which is always nice to read.
It’s been a pretty wet week which has unfortunately tested out our drains. Friday in particular we saw a torrential downpour – it wasn’t much in terms of volume but it fell quickly onto already-saturated soil. Both our main drain cover and the one outside our lounge window on Highways land blocked – luckily the overflow channel worked to take the water away from the house which is the important thing. The water that does get down that drain flows underground under our air source heat pumps and comes out at the front of our house and down through a channel to the second drain. It looks like the strength of the water is washing down stones from that channel and blocking the drain outside our lounge window, so we’re considering concreting a small area around the drain cover. It won’t necessarily stop the stones (and the whole channel is too long to concrete) but it would make it much easier to clear when we’re not slipping around in muddy water.
Ley Farm Cottages 