Our Green Story

We bought Home Farm & Lodge in 2019 and hit the ground running for the first 6 months up to Christmas and the New Year.

A quieter January and February gave us time to breathe a little and then in Spring 2020 COVID hit the country.

Everything closed and the guests stopped coming.

However, the sun was shining, and in some ways, we felt very lucky to have the space to spend lots of time outdoors.

Home Farm is approximately 2.5 acres. Originally a farmstead, it’s barns have been converted into guest rooms with the space around the barns now wildlife-friendly gardens.

In the spring of 2020, we began work to develop the gardens and added more fruit trees to an existing orchard area. Gardening organically was important right from the beginning, and no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides have been used on site. Lawns were reduced to make way for more planting and lots of native hedging and trees were put in. No Mow May in the orchard area extended into June and beyond. We’ve since added bulbs and wildflower seeds to this area too.

Our guest rooms were also given some attention. As well as upgrading furniture (a lot of it pre-loved, real wood), we started to remove plastic where we could by exchanging things like mini toiletries with refillable Faith in Nature products, removing plastic water bottles and plastic sponge scourers.

Our breakfast provision was also improved, and we continue to look at this regularly always aiming for local, plastic free and non UPF supplies.

We love that, together with the local pub, we’re right in the centre of the village. We’ve developed close relationships with many of the village groups including the very beautiful (and historically significant) St Helenas church and the stunning Mosaic Trust nature reserve which is literally a 2 minute walk from Home Farm & Lodge. We’re sports fans too so we sponsor a couple of our local sports teams - Doncaster Hockey club and Bawtry Cricket Club.….. in honour of our resident Barn Owl, we’ve also supported the Barn Owl Trust.

We continue to monitor energy usage and whilst we’ve made headway here by changing to LED lighting, motion sensor lighting in storerooms and installing a HIVE system to control heating in our rooms, we still have work to do. We continue to update appliances with energy efficient models and would like to investigate boiler replacement schemes to consider heat source models

Water usage and recycling is something that’s really important to us, particularly as the gardens are big part of our offering. We’ve installed water irrigation systems for our wall baskets (said to reduce watering by up to 80%) and have several water butts on site as well as a 5000 litre underground water harvesting tank used for watering and pond refill.

We want our guests to enjoy a stay which offers comfort and rustic charm but we do know that sustainability is important for them too. Our gardens and sustainable approach are often mentioned in our guest reviews.

“Thank you for a lovely stay. The suite was warm and cosy, we had everything we needed. The breakfast choices were really good. Lovely to see things environmentally friendly. Hosts were welcoming and friendly”

We’re absolutely delighted to have achieved the Green Tourism GOLD award this year and look forward to continuing with our goal to make a stay at Home Farm & Lodge both enjoyable and sustainable.