Home Made Plum Jam

The plum jam is ready and it's delicious. You just can't beat home made, especially when it's with fruit from your own garden.

If you are staying at Pottery House in the coming months and would like to try the plum jam, mention that you've seen it on the blog and we'll make sure it's out for breakfast the next morning.

Pottery House Maintains Green Tourism GOLD

Every two years we have an inspection by the Green Tourism Scheme. We had our inspection back in August and we're delighted to announce that we have maintained our GOLD standard.

We've made many changes since our last inspection, to help improve our rating, so we're delighted with our score. These changes include:-

• completion of our water recycling system so we can use water from our washing machines to water the garden.
• all showers in the house now have Mira Eco-shower heads, which use up to 75% less water (and therefore energy to heat the water) than standard shower heads.
• the new lighting in the large double room is all compact fluorescent
• we replaced the cooker and fridge as they were very old and the oven was next to the fridge/freezer.
  
• we've replaced the bottled water in guest room fridges with jugs of filtered water, so no more plastic bottles
• we've "disposed" of many items using www.freecycle.org so that rather than items becoming rubbish they can be used by others. Items include fridge/freezer, cooker hob and oven, kitchen table, old table, CDs and kitchen pots and pans.
  
• We're recently joined WWF and the Micro lending site Kiva.
• The Energy Saving Trust did an audit of Pottery House and recommended that the loft insulation be increased to at least 12", we're currently waiting for them to do this work.
  
• we already use many "Fair Trade" products such as tea and coffee, but we're currently trialing "Fair Trade" bed linen.
• We've taken part in many litter picks on the road between Dores and Foyers, in conjunction with the South Loch Ness Tourist Group, but in 2009 we organised this event.

Fruit Picking - Plums

We've been away for a couple of days, and returned to find many of the plums from our tree laying on the ground, after some strong winds. So time to start off some plum wine.

If you look back in this blog you can find the plum tree photo, all covered in flowers. It's has turned out to be a bumper crop this year, plenty for jams and pies still left on the tree.

Falls Of Foyers After The Rain

There's been a great deal of rain in the area for the past 48 hours, so today we went to see the Falls Of Foyers, a short drive from Dores.

It was spectacular, never seen so much water coming over the falls before.