Firstly I would like to apologise for the late posting this week. It has been a very, very busy few weeks and a real rollercoaster ride for us. We began on a high, with a small but excellent celebratory evening to mark my birthday this month. No, I can’t believe I’m so old now though some mornings I look in the mirror and am convinced I’m much older than the official count. It was an excellent meal, of course, planned to perfection by Jacqui. Good food, good wine and good company – the best mix for an evening with friends. Jacqui found me a new mug, scurrilous I know but very funny. Ireland has its own satirical newspaper, “Waterford Whispers”, with an excellent Internet shop.
The weather has been a real rollercoaster this month and this has derailed some of our plans. After the blazing hot weeks in May the rain rolled in along with high winds and occasional storms. We watched anxiously but the polytunnel stood up to it all with not a leak or any sign of shifting. Thank you Philip for such a good job! Despite the rain Jacqui began planting seeds and setting up tiny incubators using the clear plastic cake boxes from local supermarkets. They make excellent starters and so cheap! Now we have the beginnings of summer salad, a new herb bed, several different tomatoes, peas, beans and sweet peas (just because we like them).
We have been inexplicably tired this month, so much so we both did covid tests. Thankfully they were both negative – that would have been the down side of the rollercoaster. For almost I week I was falling asleep in the afternoon, something I never do. I was beginning to wonder if old age had caught up with me but we are both much better now. It has left me with a nasty sore throat however and I keep losing my voice.
I think some of it is triggered by a change in sleep patterns. One of our dogs is almost 18 and showing signs of dementia. Whilst she sleeps a lot during the day she wakes every morning around 6, giving a loud bark. I then have to get up, let her ou into the garden and let out the others who are now awake. Then we have to settle them again, give a morning biscuit or two and try to get back to sleep ourselves. I’ve never been good at getting back to sleep in the morning and at my age I have done my years of early starts. Still, I am settling into it more and often manage to doze off again.
Some of you will recall we have no bin service, our early provider having been taken over by a company who insisted they couldn’t turn their wagon on our lane so were not coming any more. Whilst we are still exploring the legal ramifications of this we are left with the problem of dealing with all our rubbish ourselves. We recycle everything we can and have got our “everything else” waste down to one medium bag every three weeks. The main problem has been food waste – mainly vegetable and fruit peelings, fish shells and meat bones.
Our early attempts at composting were not what we expected. We didn’t know the mix of green and brown, had an unventilated bin and there were eager rats chewing their way in within weeks. The results were not good – pretty horrible to be honest. Then we discovered the HotBin, an insulated unit that promises to compost in 90 days or less. Ours has just arrived, and is now warming up on the new concrete slab laid by Philip. If it works it will be a godsend. The downside is we have to transfer the existing compost in layers into the bin. It is horrible, rank and oozing – a real down on the rollercoaster. I’ll let you know if it works.
On the up side, we have another family of baby swifts hatched out in the lean-to. They are starting to fly a bit now and getting very vocal if we intrude on what they see as their space. I was collecting some wood at the weekend and was dive-bombed by their angry parents who flew round twice, shouting at me. It is amazing to see something that small can be so fearless.
And speaking of birds, the little windmills in the orchard seem to be doing their job. Yesterday I picked the first of our raspberries. Just twenty but that’s twenty more than we got last year when the birds got every single one. I’m off out soon to see if the next lot are ripe (and still there). They taste wonderful so I can’t blame the birds but I’m still not sharing too many with them.
So there you are. I’m hoping this will upload properly as we have high winds again today and lost our Internet over the weekend. A pattern of ups and downs, a small rollercoaster, in the middle of the rollercoaster that is life.
Thank you for reading, look after yourselves and I hope to see you again in a couple of weeks.
Jennie.