Wonderful Working Weather

After a few days of welcome rain, its been lovely to see the sunshine again, I know we’d had weeks of dry warm weather and the land really needed the rain, but I do so love waking up in the mornings to sunny days…It really spurs me on to get motivated early and get out there working.

Today was one of those days, I could open the top terrace doors by eight this morning, and it lets the sunshine flood in upstairs and really cheers up the place.

We made a good start by getting out and planting the first batch of squashes on our top level land by the road, we did the peppers aubergines and tomatoes the other day, today was the turn of Courgettes, Harlequin pumpkins, Spaghetti pumpkins, small, medium and large Butternuts, and Uchikiri, I’m sure that’s not quite spelt correctly, but it’s a round winter squash… you know what I mean..

We have more or less finished the planting now, just the odd gap to fill now and again, I’ve tons more squashes coming on, and will stuff them in all over the place, we can never have too many. as they store so well for winter.

I’ve been weeding the Jerusalem Artichokes this morning too, they seem to be sprouting up all over the place, plus my 6 Raspberry canes that I was given last summer but didn’t seem to be doing much… have established themselves and quadrupled when I checked them today, so they were carefully weeded and given a nice feed of comfrey liquid too… I love Raspberries…and look forward to tons in the future.

I finished weeding the Blackcurrants, which are flourishing, I’ll have to split and replant them all come the autumn.

I then managed to pick another large bag of nettles and made some soup and soda bread for lunch, did two loads of laundry and dried it in the sunshine, folded and put away all within three hours… I love this weather.

This afternoon I picked a big bowl full of Broad beans and podded them for the freezer and there will be tons more in a few days, I’m so pleased, this is the first year I’ve successfully managed to grow a reasonable amount of them…

While I was down that way, I picked tons of wild fennel to dry for the winter; I use it in many remedies. I also make gorgeous Liquor from Fennel and aguadente, and will get the first 5-litre bottle underway tomorrow.

I’ve made a start on drying plenty of herbs, already I have some, sage, lemon balm and comfrey hanging up, plus quite a lot of Mullein, I don’t need so much Mullein as I’ve been stashing it away most of the spring and have a big bag now…

My jar of Rosemary is full too, as I’ve been blessed with lots early on this year, The lavender wont be long either…it seems this year will be an abundant year for herbs…

I spent a while down on the veggie patch poking in peas… for the last two years now we’ve had a problem with lack of peas… I plant tons, but only a few plants come up, we think its mice, as we do have a problem with mice down there, so I spend any odd moments I have nipping down and just popping some more in, I just poke a hole with a finger and drop a pea in… and hope for the best. I’ve had to fill in a lot of gaps with the French beans in this way to this year… I’m not sure what happened with them either…

But I try to plant tons of everything to allow for this kind of mishap…

Most things are coming up well though and we look forward to plenty of variety this year…