September Green Log

26 Sept: Water butts all installed – still not a drop of rain yet to test them out but we can’t imagine this is a long term worry.

24 Sept: Shaun, our lovely Parwich builder, is coming on Saturday to install several water butts which will make watering all our pots easier. Since we ordered them I don’t think we’ve had a drop of rain but that cannot be a permanent anxiety…

19 Sept: It is pleasing to be able to discard fat, bones, and stale bread crusts (hope the Parwich ducks are receiving enough crusts from elsewhere). The mound of food waste is growing with no obvious signs of self-digesting but we hope that is happening silently and unseen under the heap.

5 Sept: We are becoming increasingly impressed. We’re absolutely determined not to become green bores or even bullies, but have been delighted to see that most of our guests are as intrigued as we are by the whole process and very keen to use it.

October Green Log

24 Oct: Our guests and we appear rapidly to be filling the pit; we are obviously putting stuff in faster than it can degrade. Perhaps we are going to need another. We won’t tell Nick just yet!

17 Oct: Chicken bones, herring skin and bones…we keep waiting for it to start smelling but – so far – the perfume is sweet, believe it or not. The butts are now full to the brim, with no obvious need to use the water so far collected!

9 Oct: The pile of waste food in the green cone is growing impressively, with no obvious signs of it seeping away obediently silently. The water butts after some heavy rain last Tuesday are reassuringly half full already.

4 Oct: At last we’ve had some rain (never thought one would be quite pleased about that) and the butts are successfully collecting water: enough to mean that water will actually come out of the taps.

Our Journey Greenwards

At the moment we are on a ‘green’ splurge. We have bought some rather attractive compost crocks to use indoors and have replaced the normal kettles with ‘Eco-kettles’ . We have put in each barn a slow-cooker so that our guests can come home to some hot soup or stews or even rice pudding on their return from a day’s walking in the Peak District (assuming they’ve popped in all the ingredients before setting off!). We are delighted to learn that they are already proving a great success.

Please note, we are keen to do our bit, but only where it is practical. We are not going to become obsessive about it, either for ourselves or our guests. We are keenly aware that people come to relax and get away from all the rules and regs that increasingly beset modern life; if you want to make compost and feed the green cone, that is lovely; if not, that is also fine.

Meanwhile, see our separate  Green Cone Log for other  green (slow but well-meaning!) progress :

What our guests think of us

Seventy five guests have filled in our online questionnaire in the past year. We promised to make all the findings available and – at long last – here are the main and all totally unexpurgated features.

If anyone would like to see the full results we will be very happy to send them a link so they can download the results, but this will be simpler to understand. People are asked to score 0-10 on cleanliness (9.92), the standard of individual rooms, the equipment, the facilities 9.75, the information/administration side of things, personal service, the overall quality. For each of these we score well over 9/10.

Are we value for money?:
Average Score = 9.57
8/10 8 11%; 9/10 16 21%; 10/10 51 68%

Our comment: (we suspect short breaks – at 70% of the weekly rate, may appear to be not such good value but from our point of view they are labour intensive and cost the same to set up…)