Tag Archives: rain

It rained, we made pom-poms and played balloon ball

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It’s rained all day, we don’t feel like using the kitchen because of the internal politics and I’m not eating biscuits.

So what do we do?

Well, we have to feed and water the chickens whatever the weather.

We also had a good moan about various things (centre left in a mess, one of the new toilets out of order, someone has thrown some of our stuff out of the kitchen).

We did a stock take of what we have left in the kitchen.

We picked the last of the chillies and the cape gooseberries

We made pom-poms. I managed 14 today. I explored a method I found on the internet – using a fork to wrap the wool round. I hope these photos explain it. It’s tricky getting it tied tight enough and fitting the scissors in, but it seems to work OK for producing small pom-poms.

A fork with longer tines may have been better (as would sharper scissors) and I’m just wondering how much wool you’d need to wrap a garden fork…

Then we played indoor balloon volleyball/tennis. It’s a game  we invented last year using a large balloon. The rules are not fixed, the umpiring is abysmal and the scoring is random, but it seems to work. So far nobody has died playing, we’ve had no tears, and we haven’t damaged the building (though as we’re under notice to quit I’m not sure I’m bothered).

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Indoor Balloonball – just look at the speed of that serve!

 

As we told the group – only boring people get bored.

 

Theft, rain and Rainbows

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I arrived at the farm on Saturday after dropping Julia at work, to find that the pink bale pigs guarding the entrance to the centre.

A couple of hours later I found someone leaving one of the polytunnels with a handful of tomatoes and chillies, all bright red and bursting with ripeness. I could have let it pass, but when you see the results of your year’s labour disappearing with someone else it’s difficult to stay silent. I was, however tactful.

It seems she had gone for a look round (people seem to treat it as a tourist destination) and found three tomatoes and two chillies on the floor. It was tempting to ask her if I could visit her house and purloin anything that was lying on the floor, but I didn’t. It was tempting to express scepticism, but I didn’t do that either. This turned out to be a good thing, as a quick survey of the polytunnel revealed that someone had indeed stripped the plants of all the ripe tomatoes and chillies.

It’s not the first time we’ve suffered losses, but it’s the first time someone has gone in and stripped a polytunnel. Well, they left the courgettes, marrows and cape Gooseberries, but they stripped everything red.

It’s annoying, but I have a plan. Actually I have two, but Julia won’t let me inject laxatives into things…

The group has been seeing to the poultry today, a some needed moving out into a larger pen, and found the smallest egg we’ve had so far. They have also picked anything else that is  nearly ripe in the garden, done the composting and helped prepare for the Rainbows who are coming tonight. We are now planning what to do on Wednesday – it’s a good activity for a cold, rainy afternoon, as it makes Wednesday more productive and keeps everyone dry and warm.

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I’ve made a replacement for the Wheatsheaf Loaf that broke at the Flintham show. I have to have one for the church at the weekend and need one for our visit to the Care Home tomorrow so I daren’t not have a back-up. As a bonus I made two small ones, which we can leave at the home tomorrow. The pair of them took me less than an hour to make, whereas the big ones are still taking nearly two hours despite my efforts to speed it up.

The only trouble with the small ones is that the mice are really tricky!

 

New pictures on Individual Pages

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I’ve just put some new pictures up on the individual pages, if you want to see what people are up to. As you can see from the featured image, which shows us at lunch yesterday, life isn’t exactly hectic at the moment.

Julia fell over last night when we were tidying up and bruised her hip. I call it her hip, from a sense of delicacy. Wherever the bruise is sited, it is causing considerable discomfort when she sits, and a lesson in why it is bad to carry hard objects in your back pockets.

When I suggested that the blog needed a photograph of the bruise for documentary purposes she was most uncooperative.

I really think she doesn’t take my social media work seriously.

It’s been a reasonable day for birds, with a wren hiding somewhere round the compost bin and scolding me constantly as I was working with the poultry. I’ve also seen the brightest goldfinch I’ve ever seen, so I’m wondering if it has just completed its moult.

Apart from that the big event of the day has been the constant laughing call of a green woodpecker coming from the trees between us and the road. As usual in summer I can’t see it because of all the leaves, but I’ve been able to hear it for several hours. The call is supposed to be a sign of rain.

As the sky is grey and there is a damp feel to the air I’m sure the bird is right. I do hope so, because some of the vegetables are looking distinctly done in by the constant hot, dry weather.

Of course, it won’t suit the farmers…

That monsoon feeling

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It was raining when I woke up on Saturday morning, just as dawn was breaking. It carried on raining until it was nearly lunchtime, and when I say raining, it was proper rain. The gutters were full and life as a pedestrian was complicated by the amount of splashing from traffic.

It stopped about mid day but by that time I’d put the rest of the day on hold. I didn’t fancy driving to Peterborough and the chances of finding butterflies or poppies to photograph was minimal.

I went shopping instead and cooked  the normal vegetarian curry (sweet potato and chick pea) for eating later in the week. That’s another advantage of vegetarian food (apart from cost) – it stores easily and rarely poisons anyone. In the evening we had seafood spaghetti (because we could – Number One son hates it, but he is away). Seafood is about the opposite of vegetarian food – I’m always very careful cooking that after an encounter with a bad batch of cockles in the late 70s. Bad memories can linger a long time.

Sunday passed, as Sundays do, with dropping Julia off at work at 6.00 am and an assortment of housework, Pointless and good intentions. We had pork and mushroom casserole in the evening, with stir-fried kale and baked sweet potatoes.

That brings us round to Monday morning. I’ll cover the other events of the morning in another post – for now I’ll just describe the rain.

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After a promising start we had lunch, and the rain literally started to hammer down. We were eating lunch at the time, and could see it bouncing six inches back after hitting the roof of the car. I did try to take a photo, but that sort of thing never shows up well. After ten minutes it tailed off, only to hit us again for another session about twenty minutes later.

As you can see from the main picture, it’s clearing now.

We’d been saying that we could do with some rain.

Ironically, the group is outside now, watering inside the polytunnels.

There must be  away of catching it and channelling it inside…

 

 

Rain,tie dye and a birthday

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We saw a yellow hammer on the way down the lane today, and there were 12 goldfinches on the feeders. If only I could find a recipe for them…

It rained hard, we ended up inside most of the day, and in making tie dye bags we ended up decorating the table and ourselves. Number Two son, who had come out to use a dry morning in helping us garden was upset to find there was a distinct lack of dry morning. He did manage to shift quite a bit of work despite this, pruning flower beds from the shelter of the verandah and sowing seeds in the polytunnel.

As we spent some of the afternoon in the kitchen building up a stock of salt-dough shapes we did some father-son bonding talking about dentistry, politicians and the fact that when he comes to write his memoirs doing salt-dough shapes with your dad at his age is going to seem weird.

I also offered my view on personal finances, hard work and the parameters for selecting a decent care home when your parents pass 80. I’m not convinced he was listening …

The group made a birthday card for the farmer using some of the dye from the bags, Jodi also made him a card and even bought him a gift. It’s a Mickey Mouse tie.

As I said, it’s not often that you see a man wearing a tie with the picture of his business advisor on it.

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It’s the first day of our marathon session – six days and six visits.

I did the shopping yesterday – enough for 100 pizzas plus various other bits. I then spent a couple of hours on the farm cutting veg for pizza toppings and set things out for two classes of 22.

It was a good thing I got a good start as we (a) got stuck in traffic for half an hour and (b) had to clean the corn mill, which had been brought back from the barn in a dreadful state.

By the time I had finished cleaning, the school arrived.

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It all went well, apart from the second session, where I forgot to write the names on the baking parchment. Despite this,the kids managed to identify their pizzas and everyone went away happy. I could have shown you a picture of this, if only Julia hadn’t borrowed my camera and disappeared with it.

The pictures I’ve used show kids handling the keets, making butter and standing outside the shed. The featured image is kids looking at cabbages. On a rainy Monday it was the best we had.

The session wasn’t brilliant, and there was a definite lack of education, because 22 six-year-olds can be a bit to excitable for that sort of thing. I’m unhappy that it was a lightweight session, but I’m happy that everyone seemed to have fun and the teachers were positive about the day. After examining the factors that lead to complaints being made against me, I’m taking a new attitude and just letting things drift along. If they don’t want to listen, what does it matter? I’m getting paid anyway, unlike the days when they cancel at short notice and I don’t get paid.

So – pluses from today – good advance planning, a cheerful demeanour and cash in my pocket. We persuaded seven kids to have egg on their pizzas, everyone identified their pizzas and we now have seven Polish eggs for hatching. Alasdair , Vicki and Kirsty all provided valuable support (they were the only 3 here to today) and I was able to work nettles into the conversation.  I’m also working on a unit on the Columbian exchange as the theme on Friday is “Explorers”.

Negatives – the thought that I might have sold out, the lack of photos and the weather.

So all in all it’s been a good day.

It’s the same school visiting again tomorrow, but with only 30 children, then a group with learning difficulties, then a Brownie group for Thursday night, a school on Friday and a Guide Group on Saturday. I’m allowed a day off on Sunday.

I’m already seeing pizza every time I blink, so I don’t know what it will be like by Sunday!

Heavy rain and hedgehog rolls

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I thought Monday was rainy, but it was almost dessicated compared to Tuesday.

Julia cooked scones for tea and practised with one of the bread kits we were going to use. It takes 17 minutes from opening the packet to being ready to shape, which makes it easier to use than starting from scratch. Not sure how they do it, but it makes things easier. She made hedgehog rolls, as you can see from the picture.

After a morning of threatening black clouds our visitors arrived. One was 96, and the other didn’t tell us. We started off in the kitchen with bread and reminiscence and the rain still held off, but just after 4.00, with the ladies full of scones and safely on their way back to the home, it happened.

It wasn’t so much rain as solid water descending from the sky. The water butts overflowed, the gravel area flooded and we won’t need to water the outside beds until 2017. Oh, it was wet.

In general the only inconvenience for us, working in the centre, was the noise and it felt quite good to sit inside and watch the rain. Until we had the phone call.

“Can you check the kitchen isn’t leaking?”

We had a leak when it rained a couple of weeks ago so we’ve been checking every time it rains.

It’s fair to say that my day took on a wetter aspect at that point. Good news was that the kitchen wasn’t leaking. It looks like it was a one-off combination of rain and wind that caused the problem.

You can probably guess the bad news, but I should dry out by Friday.

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We had a text this morning on the way to work – the events organiser from the home telling us that the two ladies had enjoyed themselves and hadn’t stopped talking about the visit.

It seems they particularly liked the chicks, which just goes to show that as long as you have lambs and chicks everything else falls into place.

As a result we are now booked to run a baking session at the home next month.

Bad news for Zebedee

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They had a cooking demonstration on Saturday night. You don’t need access to the calendar or the detective instincts of Sherlock Holmes to work this out – just look at the evidence.

Kitchen chairs in the centre, centre chairs in the kitchen, all our mugs in the kitchen, box of empty bottles, random cooking equipment left around, rearranged table displays and, for some reason, an explosion of Union Jacks.

It would be nice if it was clean and tidy, which was how we left it last week. However, it isn’t, and I’m not going to waste my time either discussing it or, more to the point, tidying it.

The taxi is late, again.

The polytunnel is flapping as Storm Imogen picks up speed. We’re expecting stronger winds this afternoon. I still don’t see why we need to name storms – we’ve always got by perfectly well by calling it “weather” in the past. I wonder how long it will be before we can buy a range of T shirts and mugs with various storm-related slogans – ‘Keep Calm and Harry on’ or ‘Gertrude – probably the best storm in the world’ – as the Met Office seeks to cash in.

Incidentally, there are no storms beginning with Q, U, X, Y or Z, so if you are called Queenie, Ulysses, Xavier, Yvonne or Zebedee tough luck, you are being ignored.

The taxi is here now, the rain has arrived too.

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I don’t like Mondays.

Biscuits and beans

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It’s National Biscuit Day and I missed. Fortunately I was able to get into the spirit of things because we bought biscuits for a meeting scheduled for 11am. At 10.10 they rang to cancel. It’s an ill wind that blows no good…

I know farmers need rain (or so they always tell us until they start telling us the rain will ruin them), but I really could have done without the rain today. We’re on clay (you may have heard me mention it a time or two) so it meant I couldn’t get on the newly cleared beds.

We could still get into the herbs and Julia has been potting some of the bigger ones for the plant stall on the 7th June. I’ve been on the raised beds near the kitchen and made a couple of runner bean wigwams. One will have the roots we’ve overwintered for the last two years, and the other will have some new ones from this year. Looking at the luxuriant growth of the old ones (already in flower despite being kept in a bucket in the polytunnel till now) and comparing it with the stringy new growth it doesn’t look much of a contest. We will have to see – when you talk to people about it the majority seem to think you are better using new plants every year. I will keep scrupulous records of cropping dates, numbers and weights and see what it tells us.

It will probably tell you that after the first week the reporting system fails. When you add my lack of paperwork skills to the effect of random harvesting by passers-by it’s almost a certainty!

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Behind every successful man…

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You wouldn’t think one small woman could contain so many orders but by the time she’d finished I had a list big enough to see out my Saturday, which is why I’m sitting down at just after four to finish the day. It’s not been the longest of working days, but it is Saturday and a chap expects a bit of slack.

I’ve bought compost, potted, repotted, sown seeds, weeded and swept up. I’ve tidied, moved things, made compost, picked rhubarb and watered. I did find time for a cup of tea and to show off my new “tea plantation”, talk to a keen new volunteer (I’ll soon turn her into a cynic) and er…

That reminds me, I seem to have missed lunch. I knew there was something I’d forgotten.

If I call it a diet I can feel virtuous. And hungry.

My nettle crop is looking good – enough tops for a good soup and enough mature leaves to start drying for tea. Unfortunately The Farmer and his farmer’s brain have noticed them and told me to eradicate them. This calls for either blackmail or distraction tactics. I will apply my thoughts to the problem.

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