Harrop Fold Farm

A great weekend has been enjoyed at Harrop Fold, busy, busy, with many lovely guests and loads of delicious foods. Reasonable weather too – windy, but dry and warm.

Leah baked 150 cup cakes last Sunday to take to Reaseheath College for their Open Day and returned with…not one! This weekend we had to keep up to date with cakes since it was Alice’s 20th birthday and she requested blueberry cup cakes complete with candles! All the family were home for the weekend so it certainly was a full house. Alice’s uni exams are finally over and George has now completed his finals, we are looking forward to graduation – do Mothers still wear hats? Poor Edward has school exams next week and so has to revise this week – a sleepy boy today after a very exciting day at Wembley yesterday with his school friends and one lucky father, cheering on Stockport County!

I collected my smoked salmon order on Thursday from the Cheshire Smokehouse. Leah and I arrived there just after lunchtime, having missed our lunch due to pressure of bedroom changing, however, just in time for last orders in the lovely Smokehouse café. We enjoyed a delicious lunch of their famous smoked fish and decided that this is something we really must do more often – purely, you understand in order for us to recommend to our guests where to go to eat! On a serious note, we do recommend the Smokehouse as a brilliant visit to buy what we offer on our menu; we have a fridge in the Homestead for guests to store their goodies until they return home – with their souvenirs of their visit to Cheshire and Harrop Fold Farm. Big Thanks to Barbara Stephenson of the Smokehouse for the extra goodies she sent me home with to try on our breakfast menu – this morning I served the kippers and they were divine – I sneaked some on to my breakfast plate. Yes, you will be offered these on the new breakfast menu.

Over the last month my thinking has changed from blue and yellow to green – thanks in part to Dr Douglas Gyte of the NWDA. I had such a fun night sitting next to him at the Enjoy England Tourism Awards at the beautiful St George’s Hall in Liverpool – our Capital of Culture, appropriately on St George’s Day. I was bemoaning various environmental issues I imagined I had, and kind Douglas made me see the light! A tremendously sensible attitude towards our environment he has, I have never, ever, thought of myself as any form of an ‘eco warrior’, but now I see us as a snowball rolling down the field getting bigger and bigger, only not really covered in snow but really collecting more and more ideas of helping with the environment! I have always thought about the world changing especially for our children but did not think I/we could really make a difference, but now…oh boy, do I have ideas…only simple ideas…but every little helps! Take a look in the guest rooms at our suggestions – ah ha, you will have to visit to see what we have in store – no sneak previews on line!

Must go, time is approaching midday and I need to ring Northern Harvest with this week’s shopping list. The lemon curd all went over the weekend and so must order more Amalfi lemons, and as for the Cheshire Asparagus – the most delicious ever and even enough for some very, very tasty homemade soup. However, watch out Northern Harvest, our friend Simon delivered us some of his veggie plants and David spent the weekend digging out a new veggie plot (with the help of the digger!) and so who knows, maybe this year the cows will leave our baby vegetables alone and the ponies will not play ‘chase’ amongst the potato plants! Perhaps we ought to consider new fencing?

Speak soon,
Love Sue x