Joe’s new smoker

Craig, our Hall Steward, has also been busy checking on the many visitors on site and also has been thinking about enhancing the Parklands and gardens. He has ordered some unusual shrubs and trees including mulberry bushes and yellow belly roses as well as some crab apple saplings. He has already put the mulberry bushes and crab apple trees in and will put the yellowbelly roses in at the end of March.

Talking of Lincolnshire yellowbellies, we were all educated in a new term this week by locals including Jacqui Rhodes, our Housekeeper, and Paul Barnes, our Estate Manager, who explained that  the sheep with its legs in the air in one of our fields was not actually dead but had far-welted, a colloquial expression for when sheep fall on their backs and can’t roll over and get back up again! Fortunately, Paul and Harold Brookes, a tenant, turned this unwitting sheep back up on to its feet again.

Jacqui and Caron, our Heritage Interpreter and Administrator, have both been on a course where they learned more about caring for our Historic Hall. They found out more about the maintaining buildings and protecting them from deteriorating as well as spotting wet and dry rot and pest infestation. It was a GROW course organised by Heritage Lincolnshire.

Joe Blissett, our Business and Community Manager, was very pleased to have the new ‘smoker’ delivered. This will be used to practice slow cooking our delicious Lincoln Red Beef. Joe had a go at lighting the smoker using Red English oak as a fuel. It quickly reached full temperature – 600 Fahrenheit / 350 centigrade. Joe’s main purpose for the first lighting was to burn the paint off and season the vessel.

We now have our timber prepared from fallen trees to build new bridges over our streams. The old bridges had become rotten and started to fall into the water. It will be great to have new ones in place.

Up at the Rectory, some of the final finishes have been taking place including the grouting of the tiles in the kitchen and bathroom areas and the carpets in some of the staff area at the Rectory. We have ordered a brown leather chesterfield settee for the staff lounge and also some antique valet stands for the guests to their hang clothes on in the bedrooms. The rooms have all been named after prominent South Ormsby Rectors as well as after Susannah Wesley, who lived here between 1691-95. She was the mother of John and Charles Wesley who founded the Methodist religion.