A reshuffle

Up at 6:30, in the garden by 7:30am.  Water, sow seeds because nothing has come up again, hunt around for stakes and netting to keep the pigeons and cats off.  Chase cats off the onion seedlings again.  K spends 4 hours just trimming the edges of the veggie beds.  Make lots of wee chicken wire tunnels to keep birds off peas, which the cats like to run down, so chase them off as well.  Wonder why nothing has geminated and work out it's the compost we bought.  Collect 4 barrow loads of horse sh-t from the field.  Oil the gite floor.  Spend forever making a simple shelter for the end of the chicken run because you have to hunt about for nails and screws that are the right size, and lose your gimlet.  I did, however, cut a weird angle perfectly, by hand.  So it's not all doom.  Then water everything, and sit down at 7pm.  Repeat every day for the next 40 years.

We have decided that this is enough to be getting on with and anything else can go and sod itself!  Building, baking, milling, etc, can wait.

Could have done with a photograph but I can't be arsed.

A walk in the UK

Thought I'd put these piccies on for no reason.  It's about the only place where there are no cars!

 Birling Gap

K looking out over the Seven Sisters

The sea looked like silver so I took a photo...

A new hobby

I have to repoint the gite, shift the rubble from the gite wall and sort the drainage out, plaster inside the gite, clear the sweetcorn and cucumbers, dig over the potato bed and sow green manure, build rabbit hutches, go to a sawmill and get wood for the gite staircase, paint our bedroom, finish the loft insulation, skim the beer, and collect haws and berries for jam and sauces.

So what did I do today? Sat in the hangar and carved a spoon of course!

Split a small log of lime (I think) wood and trimmed it with an axe, then spent all afternoon carving it with a spoon knife and a sloyd knife from here.

Very hard work, so it was!  The wood was very hard due to being dry as a bone - my hands kept cramping up and I am sporting a few more blisters.  Will do green wood next time.  Even a fancy anthropometric grip and a hook on the end.  Rubbed down with fine sandpaper (not too much though, as you can see) and soaked in sunflower oil.

A walk around a chateau, and progress.

Went to look around Chateau Trevarez, but only two rooms were open because the RAF bombed it flat during the war and it's a bit expensive to restore. The gardens were nice though.

Wellingtonias in the grounds - about half grown and already taller than the castle.

Bit grim for my taste to be honest, and it was only used half the year for hunting parties.

Nice trees in the grounds - more interesting to me than the buildings.

Almost as nice as our garden! Things progressing well - probably because the slugs haven't found us yet:

All's well in the tunnel - the toms are twice as big as this now, and the peppers are waking up at last.

View from polytunnel to potato patch, with pea and bean poles in mid-ground. The green netting is scaffold net, which is to keep caterpillars and cats from destroying the veg. Early carrots under the one in the foreground.

Pea frames for the 10 ft high "Champion of England" peas to scramble up.

Belters.