We bought Home Farm & Lodge in 2019 and hit the ground running for the first six months up to Christmas and the New Year. A quieter January and February gave us time to breathe a little, and then in spring 2020, Covid hit the country.
Everything closed and the guests stopped coming. However, the sun was shining, and in some ways, we felt very lucky to have the space to spend lots of time outdoors.
Home Farm is approximately 2.5 acres. Originally a farmstead, its barns have been converted into guest rooms with the space around the barns now wildlife-friendly gardens. In the spring of 2020, we began work to develop the gardens and added more fruit trees to an existing orchard area. Gardening organically was important right from the beginning, and no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides are used on site. Lawns were reduced to make way for more planting and lots of native hedging and trees were put in. No Mow May in the orchard area extended into June and beyond. We’ve since added bulbs and wildflower seeds to this area too.
Our guest rooms were also given some attention. As well as upgrading furniture (a lot of it pre-loved, real wood) we started to remove plastic where we could be exchanging things like mini toiletries with refillable Faith of Natures products, removing plastic water bottles and plastic sponge scourers. Our breakfast provision was also improved, and we continue to look at this regularly, always aiming for local, plastic-free and non-UPF supplies.
We’ve developed close relationships with many of the village groups including the very beautiful (and historically significant) St Helena’s Church
We love that, together with the local pub, we’re right in the centre of the village. We’ve developed close relationships with many of the village groups including the very beautiful (and historically significant) St Helena’s Church and the stunning Mosaic Trust nature reserve which is a two-minute walk from us. We’re sports fans too, so we sponsor a couple of our local teams – Doncaster Hockey Club and Bawtry Cricket Club. And in honour of our resident barn owl, we’ve also supported the Barn Owl Trust.
We continue to monitor energy usage and whilst we’ve made headway by changing to LED lighting, motion sensor lighting in storerooms and installing a HIVE system to control heating in our rooms, we still have work to do. We continue to update appliances with energy-efficient models and would like to investigate boiler replacement schemes to consider heat source models.
Water usage and recycling is something that’s really important to us, particularly as the gardens are a big part of our offering. We’ve installed water irrigation systems for our wall baskets (said to reduce watering by up to 80%) and have several water butts on site as well as a 5000 litre underground water harvesting tank used for watering and pond refill.
