As the world carries on turn

Many, many times I have wanted to sit down and write over the past months but I have only managed to do so a few times and only a handful of those few times have I managed to write something coherent. Part of my problem has been knowing where to start again as so much has been happening and time just seems to keep marching on without anytime to take stock, or breath before another week, two weeks, a month has pasted. But I will try…

Dog rose flower; somewhere along Lydney Docks - 14th June 2011

Family and health (or lack of it.) Since Easter my dad has spent more time in hospital than at home, just him being so ill takes up a massive amount of time and energy but when he is in hospital then someone visits him everyday, which takes up most of every afternoon. Mother is bearing the brunt of it but is has everyone stretched and then the few days that he has been at home, maybe even a week if you add all the days together, it is a battle. He can hardly do anything for himself, and getting him to eat… And every time he has been rushed back in within days of being discharged for one reason or another. This last time he didn’t make it to resus which is an improvement, but is does leave everyone on edge waiting for the next phone call to say he is coming home, not really coming home or been rushed back in.

I have also still been trying to sort out my health problems, I have changed doctors and hopefully now am getting somewhere. I feel a little bit like I’m being a hypercondriac as a part from a few blips I am mostly fine, and feel better than I have in years, but I know if I don’t get things sorted then I could end up back in the mess I was in a few years ago and I don’t ever want to go back there so it has to be sort out.

Work. It is all change at work again; I seem to write this so often but at the moment the three years of funding we had has come to an ended and there is only work for me until the end of September. I realised I have been very silly as although I’ve been doing my job for two years now I have been reluctant, or completely refused, to do the university course that would mean I was qualified to be doing my job so I now only have my experience and the good name of the charity I work for if I was to go up against someone else if another very rear job were to come up. I am annoyed with myself for letting this happen but the work / home life balance is a great battle I always seem to be fighting and committing myself to an extra day or more a week away from home to be qualified for something I was already doing perfectly well was something I was not willing to do… Add to that the growing suspicion that I would have hated the course and it has been one of the very few times home life has won over. The summer holidays started this week, so our busiest time of year, and I am only working ‘my patch’ one day a week and so doing a fair amount of travelling, also seem to have taken on an extra half a day more than I promised myself I would.

Flowers at Ryton Gardens; I have no idea what these are - 11th September 2010

Holiday. I had a whole week off at the start off this month and I did hardly anything with it which is not like me at all, normally for a month before time off I am writing a list of every backbreaking job I want to get finish whilst I ‘have time’. I think I still had a list but in the end I just pottered about and spent time with friends. It was nice, needed and somehow I have managed not to beat myself up about not ‘getting things done’.

Busy bees; comb after less than a month they moved into the hive - 11th July 2011

Bees. This is possibly the most exciting news of all and from the second the swarm arrived I have wanted to blog about it but not jinx it. WE HAVE BEES!!! Last year mother was given a top bar beehive by her sister and since then the plan has been to start keeping bees again. We had our name down for a swarm but weren’t really doing anything more proactive about getting one as everything else has been some manic. Then, during a complete nightmare of a week a swarm just arrived on a gorse bush just across from the house, a neighbour almost walked into it and came and knocked on the door as he knew we wanted one. Him and middle-younger-sister carried the hive out and left it near to them with the lid off in the hope they would go in and then I arrived home (on a call that the cows where out, it was that kind of week) to find mother cutting the branch they were on and putting it into the hive. And they have been with us ever since!

Growing in numbers - 30th July 2011

It has been amazing watching them build their combs and how they change; to begin with they were not in the least bit worried about us opening up the hive and I have even been in there without a hat or vail and have still not worn gloves but they have started getting a little more up set if the hive is open now. The comb seems to change every time we look in there as well; to begin with it was white and looked so breakable, then you could see the different between the honey and brood cells and now the comb is covered is golden stickiness.

Each time we open the hive I have been taking photos and have created a new Flickr set to record it – Bees

Goats. It would seem that I am not kidding this year after all. I’m not too worried about it as I know the Jelly Beanies kidded fine and they were living in with Knightshade at the same time but it is a bit disappointing. I have put Briony up for sale and am trying to find somewhere/someone who will take Bella on loan for a year or so until I am more sorted. I have had lots of phone calls and emails about them but haven’t been sorted enough to contact people and both Briony and Bella make it impossible to take photos of them as they are just to interested in the camera or having a fuss. I was looking at their ‘baby photos’ the other day and I can’t believe have they have completely changed colour and markings, they are now both mottled and patchy and stunning.

Wool craft

I now have a knitting machine courtesy of a local freecycle member, this is to go along with my box of needles, drop spindle, travel sawing machine, peg loom and sock knitting machine. I desperately need to carry on with my decluttering to find room for it all, and space to set some of it up.

The summer holidays start next week, a very busy time of year with work. And it is still the middle of the growing session, and aren’t the weeds growing with all this warm, wet weather we’ve been having.  Busy, busy, busy

Look at the camera, now smile!

This is the photo my middle-sister took of me with my basket full of courgettes at the weekend, all harvested just minutes earlier from the ‘muck heap’ garden. I’ve never been keen on having ‘look at the camera’ photos taken, no matter how real your smile might be they always seem to have a fake ‘oh-my-god’ look about them.

The real point of the photo is the courgettes, other than the few potatoes that I’ve still digging up they’re the only produce being harvested from the veg garden. The purple sprouting, brussel sprouts and kale have all been caterpillared badly, I’m hoping that they will make a come back but that is going to take some time. I still have some kale and spring cabbage plants waiting to go out but I haven’t dared risk them yet, it wouldn’t take a day for them to get eaten with the amount of caterpillars still around. I took all the tomato plants out at the weekend as well; we haven’t had any fruit from them but they have been left pretty much to get on with it and seem to have blight and too many side shoots to have produced anything and what little fruit were on the plants were very small and turning a brown colour. Next year I’m going to grow bush types, then maybe they will fruit better just being left with out having the side shoots taken off and staking. I’ve already bought 100 yellow Tumbling Tom seeds from ebay and am looking for some red seeds as well. There is also a container tomato called ‘Garden Pearl’ which I’d like to grow as well.

On the plus side though we have had a few fair sized onions from the old spring onions I put in last year, we get old waste veg sacks from one of the local green grocers for the goats and often there are old bunches of spring onions in them. I only put them in to break up all the brassica plants to avoid cub root getting in but they’ve done well. They need eating now as they only have thin skins so won’t go through the winter. My free magazine-give-away strawberry plants are producing lots of runners as well, so that will mean extra fruit next year. I need to re-pot the older plants now as they still haven’t moved from the old bucket I put them in ‘for the time being’ when they arrived. The boxes that had potatoes in are coming in handy for potting things up and on, it’s turned the manure that they were grown in into really nice soil.

It’s a strange time of year really, there are still things that need doing in the garden but most of them are planning and preparing for next year jobs. Everything has started winding down a bit as well, the nights are drawing in and there is hardly anytime for good weather left, I’m still ready to get going and waiting for summer to happen and it’s already been and gone really!

Here in spirit

Well, lately my blogging has been very patchy to say the least, partly because it’s summer and that is a very busy time of year for us food producers, add to that the fact that for the past 5 weeks I have been working two part-time jobs (I don’t know how I ever managed to do anything when I worked full-time… yes I do I just didn’t) and it makes it an extra busy time of year and then added to that is the joys of computer problems, I think it has been re-formatted twice now, maybe more, blogging has just not proved to be an easy task.

But I have been here in spirit, which I hope makes up for it a little bit, and have even been making lists about what I wanted to write about each day in the hope that I would be able to (apart from the fact that I have lost both lists) up-date everything. Now that the school summer are almost over I should have a little bit more time so will be able to write more.

A weekend of half dones

Last weekend was hot, I was off Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and I think only on the Thursday was it cool enough to be outside working all day. The other days had a few hours mid-afternoon that just had to be spend sat inside in the cool until outside was cooler.

So really it doesn’t feel like much was done, Rhys did very well at cleaning the kitchen. We started taking down an old chicken shed ready for a move round and new goat pen, we collected and shredded a load of gorse for the goats and picked branches for them all but Sunday, changed over the water butt by the goats as the old one had started to drip and we were given a much bigger one, gave most of the sacks of muck that had been collected away on Freecycle (me and mummy were told a very funny story about mice and shampoo), I picked out wood for splitting one of the goat houses in two ready for kidding at the start of next month but we didn’t actually manage to split the house.

I half-heartly started planting some more potato’s in sacks (we eat alot of potatoes and I can’t bare the thought of any being left in the ground so they’re all going in sacks) but gave up because of the heat. I thought about planting some carrots and beetroot in the garden (cats have messed mummy’s up) but never got out there to do so.

Ooh, I did pick up some ‘new’ hutches for the quail to go in from someone belonging to LETS, it’s my first time spending Deans and the people I got the hutches from had an interesting holding and might want some quail…

…Basically lots of things got started and were on My List but never got finished.