At Valley Farm, we take green tourism very seriously. We care about our environment and have introduced many measures that will help to reduce our carbon footprint.

Solar panels provide much of the hot water in both self catering cottages and a huge solar tracker heats the swimming pool and provides hot water for the B&B. This has greatly reduced our reliance on oil as the primary source of water heating. In fact, we burn almost no oil from May until the end of October.

Our 5 kW wind turbine, installed in August 2007, is making a contribution to our electricity consumption. It stands on a 12 metre pole in the corner of our paddock. On wet, windy days when there is no solar gain for the hot water, it is great to see the turbine spinning.

Rookyard Cottage, our most recent self catering cottage, has been built with care of the environment in mind. It is timber framed and clad and it is insulated with recycled newspaper. It is very thermally efficient, with wood framed sealed double glazing and it requires very little heating in the winter. Oil-fired central heating is supplemented by a wood burning stove. The roof drains into a rainwater harvesting tank which supplies the lavatories and washing machine and we have tried to select lights and appliances which consume lower amounts of energy.

Waveney District Council has an excellent recycling scheme for household rubbish and we add to this by composting all our green waste for use on the garden.

For our B&B guests, we use as much local produce as possible. Free range Suffolk pork sausages and bacon come from a local butcher. Our eggs come from hens that grub about in the yard at a local farm and we obtain our honey, jams and marmalade direct from the producers at the farmers market. In summer, tomatoes come from our own garden.

If you choose Valley Farm for your holiday you will have all the advantages of a comfortable, well equipped cottage or B&B and know that it is not “costing the earth”.