As many people suggest, January is a time to reflect, rest (huddling around a roaring fire if possible!) and plan for the busy months ahead and its no different in our family. Christmas has never been the same since we lost Steve two and a half years ago, but together with both our own families and our Croots family, we make it as good as we can.
As usual we had a really busy run up to Christmas, with the last few days being really frantic getting over 600 Christmas orders out and I’d like to personally thank all of you for your continued support with this. After that, Christmas week was spent mainly with family with a bit of ten pin bowling, cinema, lots of dog walking and a couple of parties thrown in! In the shop, we were busy tidying, cleaning and stock taking as we have to at this point of the year.
The work on the farm continues of course, whether its putting out big bales of haylage for the horses and sheep to eat, washing the horses legs out to prevent mud fever or getting the blacksmith in to get our show animals ready for the National Shire Horse Show in March. This month we will also be scanning our ewes to find out how many lambs to prepare for in April. Despite the cold and sometimes very wet weather, the farm can still be very beautiful at this time of year and we are still keen on developing ideas on how to enhance it further to be a bigger part of our local community.
With regards to our future plans, we are working hard on our vision to provide more amazing local food experiences on the farm and so we are working on putting on some new events and to make our old favourites bigger and better, we are busy developing new cakes, scones and pies in our Bakery, trying out new flavours for our Butchery counter and of course Kelvin is busy developing new menus for lunches and afternoon teas. We are also working on new projects to reduce our waste and our energy usage as we are still facing huge energy bills at the moment and we want to reduce our carbon emissions as well.
Its been suggested that I need to do more videos of our farm life as people seem to like watching them- its even been suggested that we go on Tik Tok, so watch this space!!!! I just need to get a bit more technology knowledge from Nicole & Jamie first!!!
So, as ever lots of stuff to work on. As always I welcome your feedback to help us improve, whether my email, google reviews, Messenger or whatever method suits you!
With best wishes for a healthy and happy 2024!
Kay x