Country Sports

It's spring again and the wildlife and I can relax for a while and live in peace. No more hunting til autumn means no more worrying about whether my animals will be scared or hurt and no need to will the foxes to come and hide here.

I have spent all my life sitting on the country sports fence. Having been involved with horses as a child and teenager, I managed to avoid going hunting myself though my pony was taken by a friend a couple of times. I've always been an animal lover and couldn't see the fun in it but I've always been surrounded by people who do. And as a fickle youngster I managed to think nothing of going to hunt balls, (probably because the most handsome boys were to be found there - the rich have an annoying habit of being beautiful).

I once went fishing with a boyfriend - a beautiful spot and almost a nice way to spend a day. The moment when I first felt a tug on the line was quite exciting even for a split second, but then I immediately felt awful about yanking the poor thing out of its watery world, a barbed hook in the roof of its mouth. Ouch.

For several years I worked as a PA to the owner of a large country estate where one of my duties was to help organise shooting parties. I don't like the idea of shooting wild birds for fun but it's another one of those traditional country sports that amuses the county set over the winter. They're a funny lot... I should know, I married one of them.

Thankfully William had long given up shooting when I met him and had also decided a long time ago he was never getting on a horse again. He's also a zooologist by training so whilst he doesn't love animals like I do, he has some sort of interest in them. He stopped shooting when he was a student realising the idiocy of shooting wild ducks one weekend and counting them for a survey the next.

And so we sit here in our nice little place, both country people but with different backgrounds and experiences and we're surrounded by other country people with their own views and desires. Whatever happens nearby Brook Farm is, I hope, a haven for wildlife and therefore a quiet, peaceful place to stay. We like it like that and our guests like it like that.

'Harm None' is my motto - 'Live and Let Live' is William's!

It's Not That Easy Being Green

Today I forgot the mushrooms. I haven't any B&B guests this week so I only needed a few to put in the Hen House breakfast hamper with the sausages, bacon and tomatoes. Should I drive the two miles back down to Tenbury for a few mushrooms or give my guests some lovely organic local yogurt instead. The yogurt it is.

I have dilemmas like this every week. Ideally I am buying local, organic and fair trade and also keeping an eye on how much I use my car. But local doesn't always have organic and fairtrade. So do I shun the small local shops and use more fuel to get to specialist shops or supermarkets further away or do I buy the best I can get locally?

I used to buy my bacon direct from a local farmer but felt bad because I'd taken my business away from the local butcher, so I switched back and now I feel bad about the farmer. The local butcher sometimes has organic chicken, but rarely anything else organic, but he does have local free range meats. Do my guests expect me to buy organic bacon from further away or buy the local free range stuff?

If I go to the Spar in Tenbury for some tonic water and I also need tomatoes for breakfasts, do I ignore their dutch tomatoes in the hope that the greengrocer has some english ones? He's at the other end of town and might only have dutch ones too. It's easy in summer because there is a local farm that supplies the greengrocer with the loveliest juiciest tomatoes which I buy by the box and keep out of the fridge where they ripen to their most gorgeous tasty best. But they're not labelled organic. Should I visit the farm and check what they are putting on them?

In an ideal world I would grow my own, but my success rate with tomatoes isn't impressive - if they manage to get off the ground without slug damage, they ripen so slowly that only one or two guests would get them on their breakfast during the summer and anyone who came in September/October would find only tomato based breakfasts on the menu. (And speaking of slugs - I garden organically and won't use pellets. And being a big soft veggie I am certainly not growing my own pigs.)

Marmalade and jams come from the lovely ladies at the WI - they're not going to fork out for an organic certifcation but I know their fruit is chemical free. But if they run out of marmalade which happens alarmingly often what then? At the moment I have delicious marmalade made by my friend Karen from Hopton House B&B nearby. Otherwise I buy La Vieja Fabrica made in Seville. It's very good and it's going to be the oranges or the jars of marmalade that are flown over here isn't it? You don't get many productive orange trees in Worcestershire.

And it's not just the food that causes hand-wringing - the laundry - OMG the laundry. For a few months I struggled to do all the washing and ironing myself, but was it such a good thing to have the washing machine and the iron running almost permanently? Now I use a laundry for the bedlinen and towels for guests, and whilst they are using environmentally friendly washing powders, they are of course using industrial sized washing machines, tumble driers and ironing machines. So though I can quite honestly say we don't have a tumble drier on green grounds and all our own washing is air dried, I am in fact paying someone else to use one for me. Oh, what to do, what to do.

It's not easy being green but, dear guest, please trust that I believe in respecting this planet and all that live on it and I am doing the best I possibly can.

February is a time for planning and dreaming. Anything is still possible this year. I can dream of the Hen House and the B&B rooms being booked up for the whole of spring and summer, of the garden looking beautiful from April to September, of fixing my poor old car up, of walking the whole of the Teme Valley, of training the donkeys to pull a cart, of visiting the gardens I want to see and of spending sunny days with good friends.

Some of it I might even manage.

In the meantime, I write lists - each list getting longer daily with a new idea.

And at night I jump into bed with Carol Klein and her gorgeous book 'Life in a Cottage Garden' and I fastforward my dreams and soak up the coming of spring and summer, a notebook on my bedside table for jotting down brilliant tips and the names of plants she makes sound so irresistible. There is plenty of time to fit everything in because it's only February - a time when anything I imagine can become true.

A Right Old Knees Up

Christmas has been and gone now and peace is returning to Brook Farm. Burst pipes and frozen drains didn't stop us from scoffing and guzzling ridiculous amounts and having a good old knees up round the joanna. My Dad on the guitar and lead vocals, the beautiful niece perfectly in tune and the rest of us catterwauling along as best we could until the choruses when aunts, uncles, cousins, mothers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives all came together in perfect harmony and it all sounded fab (I'm lying) Doing the Lambeth Walk, Don't Dilly Dally and Knees Up Mother Brown were the favourites and to finish Oom Pah Pah from Oliver Twist. What a giggle.

All is quiet now, we've had some B&B guests and some Hen House guests come and go and more here now for New Year break. The candles are lit, the log fires burning. And now I have time to catch my breath and start to think about the nice things to come, starting I think with a bare root rose order. Lovely thing to do by the fire on a chilly January evening. Happy New Year to everyone (if anyone?) that reads this!

It all goes quiet and I dolittle

With fewer guests around at this time of year and the garden preparing for its winter sleep, I spend more time playing Dr Dolittle. For me animals bring Brook Farm to life - inside and out. However pleasing a scene is in our garden, if a cat or a chicken saunters into view it becomes even more so. Picture the old orchard on the hill - misshapen old apple and damson trees, a few wildflowers and some grass. A lovely country scene in itself, but add a couple of donkeys watching you quietly as they chew messily on an apple, the juice pouring out of their mouths and it becomes a real delight - well it does to me anyway.

In summer, a walk around the garden will find a scattering of sunbathing cats in various lazy poses, decorating the sunnier spots and looking as good as any expensive piece of sculpture to me.

And heading off into the woods for a walk in the morning wouldn't be the same without the dogs bounding ahead sweetly delighted with the same route every day thanks to the delicious smells laid by various wild creatures overnight.

At the beginning of November I bring the donkeys into the big barn overnight. It means more work for me, but I love having them here next to the house looking all cuddly and cosy in their straw bed. This year for the first time they are having to share with my new chickens. Neither species was particularly pleased about the arrangement for the first couple of days and I nearly had a squashed chicken or two as the donk Queenie chased them around the barn trying to hit them with her front feet. Several barn cats enjoyed the show from the safety of the hayloft - I'm sure they were grinning.

Willy says I'd have the whole menagerie in the house if he wasn't here and he could be right. I still have a childish love of seeing outside animals indoors and didn't rush to shoo out the hens when they came exploring the hall and the sitting room the other day. When I was about twelve I used to ride a neighbour's pony called Snowy. One day, when my parents were out, my friend and I thought it would be a good idea to take Snowy indoors. It was summer so he was quite clean but unfortunately as we took him through the sitting room he lifted his tail and started to produce an enormous poo. Being twelve year old girls we shrieked and giggled and were generally useless and I grabbed the nearest thing I could find in the kitchen which happened to be the cake tin and caught most of the pile of steaming dung in it. The rest of it went on a very pale rug. We obviously thought it was hilarious and I got away with it for years.....well til now actually. Sorry Mum!

So if you fancy snuggling by a roaring fire with or without a furry animal at your feet - whether you want to come and sightsee the area, go for bracing walks or simply Do Little, Brook Farm has a warm welcome, a cup of tea and a nice slice of cake waiting for you. (I have a brand spanking new cake tin honest.)

Look no further than Twitter for a great B&B!

For me running a B&B is made so much more fun by tweeting. There's a lovely community of Lords and Ladies (landlords and landladies) that chat, advise and giggle often early in the morning when normal people are still in bed and I just love being part of it.

It is also a brilliant way of finding places you just have to go and stay in. I started tweeting in March this year egged on by my friend Karen (www.shropshirebreakfast.co.uk) and by the beginning of April had a "Must Stay" list as long as my donkeys' ears, so using the excuse of our 15th wedding anniversary we planned a lovely TwitterTrail starting at the Grand Designs favourite Peel Castle (www.peelcastle.co.uk), then on to the beautiful country house Austwick Hall (www.austwickhall.co.uk), then some sea air at "The Best B&B in the NorthWest" (www.no43.org.uk) and finally the elegant Ashton in Lancaster (www.theashtonlancaster.co.uk)

A better selection of modern B&Bs would be hard to find and we had an amazing time. Each one was different, though all had the highest standards, and that is what is so lovely about British B&Bs : they are so different, being as they are, creations and perhaps even extensions of the owner's personality. And what food! Quality local food cooked perfectly every time.

Thinking of our 'little' farmhouse B&B, we felt like the poor relations in these enormous rooms and stylish surroundings. But of course our 'nice little place' is different again and though when I arrived back, with guests arriving that evening, I felt inadequate in comparison, the guests when they arrived did the same sort of ooohing and ahhing that we had been doing all week.

So there is obviously a place for "New Country" which is how I like to think of my own B&B alongside "Boutique" and "Luxury" and - er- "Castle" in the B&B world. What a great choice we have in this country. Thank goodness for that.

Ah Autumn - mellow fruitfulness for some; chainsaws and wellies for us. We've got fruit too - a few sloes, pears, autumn raspberries, loads of damsons and enough apples to feed the world. If the world has long enough arms to pick them. Our old orchard is planted on a bank and the trees are about 40 years old and big 'uns so we have to wait for windfalls to be able to appreciate their fruit.

This suits me "Leave it for the birds" I say, but Willy is different. He likes to strip a tree or bush of all its fruit and stash it in the freezer in the misguided belief that I will one day turn them into something delicious. He still does this every year despite the fact that I barely ever get around to doing so - a strategy that has worked well (finally) as he has taken to preserving and pickling things himself this year. He is in fact right now decanting damson vodka which is much loved by our guests. Hopefully soon he will move on to making pies and crumbles. I'll make the custard.

There are times when I can put on a good performance in the kitchen (hopefully most mornings as I run a B&B) but I would very much rather be in the garden than baking cakes and making jam, and autumn to me is the beginning of the gardening year. Although it is looking much as I feel at the end of a busy summer, it is now that I can start its makeover for a new look next year. Not a completely new look, but an improved look - Plants get moved from one place to another (Why on earth didn't I put them there in the first place?) Things get lifted and divided to give me more of the plants I love (Yay - free plants!) and a lot of stuff gets put on The Naughty Step.

The Naughty Step is a bank around the back of one of our barns where we put the thugs who would take over the garden if they had their way: a boring Lysimachia, Alchemilla mollis and masses of wild strawberries. There was a time when we were desperate for something to fill the acres of space we had and we were grateful for them so rather than compost them, we allow them this space to do their worst. It will probably end up being the best bit of the garden.

And with autumn, the chainsaw comes out again. Big old trees, weighed down with the rain on their leaves finally give in and fall. There was an ash at the far end that had been getting lower and lower over the seven years we've been here. It was a bit like living with an aged grandparent, he'd had a great life - what heights he'd reached - and we knew the end was coming, but it was still sad when he fell.

But what a great supply of wood for the fires this year. I love lighting the fires of an evening - that and a few candles make for a lovely welcome. Let's start getting cosy: the nights are drawing in.