I thought July was a busy month but we ended up fully booked through August with some very last minute bookings filling in the few gaps that we had. Everyone who stayed had a great time and we had a lot of good feed back. People find that our location is very central to all the local amenities. Most people couldn’t believe that you could be in Torquay in 10 minutes, yet be here in this valley amongst nature… We had our normal visit from the Canada Geese, beautiful and noisy!

I am not sure if it was the olympic effect, but we had plenty of cyclists here this month – both MTB and Roadies! It is a great way to see the area, and there is something for all skill levels, you can just take a gentle spin to the pubs or down to the river for a picnic. On the other hand if you take your bikes seriously you can take a great coastal trip all the way the Coast to Exeter, then over the moor.

This month on the farm we decided to bale the barley as silage, we normally combine this crop but due to the wet summer the weeds had grown up through the crop making it very difficult to thresh the grain from the straw. This is not helped by the fact that the farm is organic so we don’t spray chemicals to control weeds or pests. By cutting it before its ripe then baling it and wrapping in plastic to keep it  air tight we end up with a great feed for the cattle.The only problem is that we don’t get any straw from it so will have buy some in.

We spent a lot of time in the summer moving cattle from one field to another so that they had plenty of grass to eat, and there certainly was a lot of it because of the constant rain!