Browse through our blog posts to find out what life is like at Hoe Grange Holidays along with some great ideas for days out in the Peak District.
A disaster at Hoe Grange - this morning I went as usual to let our free range chickens out only to find feathers everywhere. In horror I realised that I had forgotten to shut them up the previous evening - having just come back from holiday my routine went to pot and I simply some how forgot - as David will tell you I am usually paranoid about shutting them up last thing at night. the girls enjoying the great outdoors The hazard of a truly free range life is that Mr Fox is never far away and ever ready to take advantage of any such opportun...
What a hectic week! laying turf - with a little help from the hens! David and I have been working at full speed to get everything finished for the first guests in our new Rainster log cabin this weekend. From clearing up outside and laying the turf, (helped by "clucking" hens - at least that's what I thought David said) to hanging curtains, washing crockery, cleaning, making the beds and adding the last minute little touches that make it home from home. The only things I forgot were the bread bin and toaster ! We also had a little help fr...
Our cute, cuddly lambs are now 6 weeks old and growing fast and Elliot is still bottle feeding them twice a day. Coco, Chanel, Tia and Maria love to gambol around the garden following him at top speed! They are extremely agile. Amazingly I managed to capture this picture of all four of them standing still. Cute lambs at Hoe Grange Free range freedom for hens at Hoe Grange! Not quite so cute are our 8 new hens - in fact far from cute - they have been rescued from a more intensive egg producing unit and are in quite a state. They are...
After a lot of digging things are at last heading in the right direction - the trenches in the field where the pipes for the ground source heating have been laid have now been refilled and the soil raked flat. It certainly looks a lot better, however the hens will miss their daily worm hunt following me and the tractor along - in fact I am surprised that we have still got our 6 free range hens as they get right under the digger bucket in their desperate bid to be the first to catch a worm! Trenches for ground source heating refilled O...
Building work on our new self catering log cabin continues, as does the brilliant Spring sunshine. Today the block work structure is being filled in using the recycled rubble and broken bricks, quite a labour intensive process. The rubble is shovelled in and then compacted down with the digger and a wacker plate to make a solid surface. It is extremely important to ensure that everything is crushed and compacted correctly or the whole structure could move and crack when the cabin is placed on top of the foundations - we definitely don't wa...