Newness

It's started!

Yes, that moment in my life that I was hoping I would not have to deal with until he was into his third decade ;-)

Girls!

He has a girlfriend no less. His first and so new.

He even asked my advice when she asked him out. I suppose I should be grateful that he started there.



It's a funny feeling. No one told you this when you had your baby.
When they were telling you to push and you were cursing or crying or both.
When they were telling you it wouldn't be long before you held your long awaited newborn in your arms.
They left out the bit that said:
'But it's only temporary that he's yours, soon there are going to be others that come in to the limelight, that muscle in on your territory and claim they 'love him'. These same ones will love him and these same ones will hurt him, hurt my baby like he has never been hurt before.
But this time I can't put a band aid on his boo boo or puff on some gas and air to make the pain go away. This will be hard, aching and raw and he will just have to go through it and come out the otherside.

He won't want me when he is in the love part, I will need to learn to shadow dance in the wings.
I will need to learn when my cues arise and when to apply the safety harness to make sure his falls don't completely hit the ground and that he gets up again and back on the bike.

Inside my mama bear will roar like no other. Trees will tremble, the earth will shake, let it be known. I will curse these young women and smite them with balls of fire. 

I won't tell him anything other than he will learn to breathe painlessly again. I will hold him and tell him that love is not painful when it is right, that love is a truly beautiful thing. I will reassure him that there is someone who is right for him out there, but he has yet to find her. I will tell him that love is indeed the most painful and most amazing thing all at the same time and her guises are wily and immense.

For now though, my boy, my firstborn, is enjoying these newborn days of young love and I, continue to learn  and evolve through him.

Titivating talk !

So for many, and most weeks for me, my home journey looks a little like this:




But my journey home from work this week has consisted of this!



On a 'trying to be clever' route to cut out the roadworks this week, I decided to go the scenic way! Each day at 3.15 the cows are crossing from their field to the milking shed. These huge bovines with their agonisingly painful mammaries* swaying precariously as they lumber across the road has actually been a lovely distraction for me and I think, roadworks or not, I may once or twice a week just go this way so that I am forced to stop for 2 minutes and just wait whilst these gentle giants go about their daily routine and temporarily moving into mine. Two minutes to slow down and breathe whilst I watch the rhythmic plod.

*Mothers amongst you will fully compute what I mean here!

It's been a bit of a week of crazies this week of mine: beginning on Wednesday evening when the youngest Beehive brought home some unwanted visitors that created a mad dash to the chemist and an evening of us all sitting with our hair wrapped in greasy slime as we suffocated any possible life form that may (or may well not in the case of the rest of us) have decided to set up camp in our hair. It is, sadly, one of the risks of children and, according to my mother's sleuthing, children between 5 and 11 are particularly susceptible. It's no surprise really as they're in that social stage where it is important, for girls in particular, to hug their friends and share brushes and wear their hair flapping around them. LMB has shortish hair (still *sigh*), and it's pretty thin in comparison to the rest of us, however, they still decided to climb aboard!

Deciding she was obviously on a roll this week, she then proceeded to forget to take her swimming stuff to school this morning, so, I ran back to get it only discovering she'd left the bag on the floor, absent of both costume and towel. Hastily I shoved in both and ran back up to school only for the teacher to inform me she was actually wearing her costume...I think you know what's next.



 Luckily I am eternally grateful for good friends of whom you can call from the car in a frantic rush as you're now late for work, to ask them to bring a pair of their own daughter's underwear to save your own daughter's dignity and the embarrassment of having to go commando!

For my own flash to the world, I chose to wear a lovely cowl style t-shirt to work this morning. I work with little ones, but they are independent and, well, you know the whole Montessori thang, so I never need to bend down to push a tricycle for a child...never...particularly not when there is a potential new parent in and I'm just showing her 1.5year old how to pedal the trike...never...no...not at all!

Finally, you realise you really are a complete bumpkin when you offer to give a lift to a friend only to have to remove the four chickens from the front seat so she can get in*. The chickens can't go in the boot as it's full of plastic bottles, fishing rods and compost to enable the weekend's work of making some outdoor play stuff for school.



Oh well!

Pig roast in the village hall tomorrow night along with a knees up with girlfriends ( including my knicker pal) and I aim to be suitably attired for any kind of wardrobe malfunction when 'knees-upping' - kevlar if necessary!

So that just about sums up our week!

Have a good weekend!


*the chooks were in a box, just in case you ever wanted a lift from me in the future !

Support your local farmers - g'wan, you know you want to!

Oh it's nearly Friday again, how did that happen?

What a crazy week, again. Mr Beehive has been back Stateside this week, so we've not seen him for 10 days. This has meant that the juggling of who needs to be where and when has been doubled this week as I can't add him into the equation of taxi services, thus lightening my load.

Still, much as I miss him, it's rather nice to not feel the need to make conversation or turn on the tv. I've been able to work later if I've needed to, catch up with some knitting and trawl ebay a bit more than normal.

Last week we sold our wooden climbing tower. It was a lovely, if not extravagant buy, for our large turf-only Scottish garden. Here in our current home of little turf, our garden is divided up into many sections, but not one of them large enough to house it. So it has forlornly sat in the corner of the garage for the last two years until we decided what to do with it, whilst the children who used to play on it grew up. It was also sidelined for the trampoline.
Would it have another life as something else in the garden? Would it keep us warm this winter? Would it get a new home where other children would make use of it?
At one point, there was a slight possibility that it may have become a tree house in our friends' new garden, but, it was perhaps as much a daunting a task to move it there, as it was to take it to the tip.
So we put it on Gumtree and last week it moved to a new garden in a new part of the UK.

But, you know, just as you think you've made a profit (well, in so far as it gave us more cash sold than it would have done as firewood!), you realise you need to fork out again. So, in the front door and immediately out the back to buy us a trailer for the car and 100 reclaimed paving bricks for the new path in the ongoing saga of flood prevention!

But then, I guess that is the life when you're trying to grow, produce and be fairly self sufficient, as soon as you grow and harvest one thing, you need to plough the proceeds back into the soil to make the next harvest. Our next buy is going to be three more chickens to replace the ones that fox took and I'm hoping that the place I normally go to get chooks, will have something good in stock.

I suppose chickens, as a whole, aren't that profitable.We feed them organic layers pellets that generally cost us around £17 a bag. The bag lasts around 3 weeks. In those three weeks, if they're all laying we should get 63 eggs a week, which will give us on average £10 a week if we sold them all, which we don't as we like them too. But factor in corn and bedding and the fact that one has gone broody again, at least two are off lay, not sure why, but I think one has always been a little dodgy (she was donated to us after a fox or cat attacked her in her original home) and one is one of my first band of girls, so is about three now and just living her retirement, we're not looking to make much cash from eggs.

I sometimes make a little cash from selling on my surplus seedlings. I have sold courgette and beans this year, but we would make more from the actual produce itself, so we're looking to 'go large' (that is a joke by the way, I just mean slightly bigger!) and have our names down on the allotment waiting list, this will then give us space for a polytunnel for tomatoes and strawberries and free up the green house for more cut flower seedlings. The outside area of the allotment I have plans for cut flowers, again, which I hope to sell at the gate with the eggs.

The one area that looked, in theory, to be more profitable through the eyes of a smallholder, was bees: honey, wax and propolis.  However, my beekeeping pals are saying that, due to the hideous winter, the losses are dreadful and nucs are looking to boom up in price, which makes a newbie start up like myself, wondering if forking out £350 for a nuc of bees is a sensible thing to do at the moment. Perhaps, if this two year ban on the neonicotinoids makes a difference to the numbers, the nuc prices will drop.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that smallholding is not profitable as a business. It  has to be a way of life because you feel strongly about growing or producing your own. I have just finished reading The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball   
 and it's a wonderful read, particularly for the closet farmer, like myself. She really brings to the forefront the fact that you have to LOVE the land and love the reasons why you do what you do in order to want to get out of bed at 4am every morning to *milk your herd of cows (*insert what you want!). Being a smallholder is not, by even a nano fraction, the same as being a full on farmer like Kristin, but the goals are similar. I certainly do not get out of bed at 4am, god forbid, 6am kills me, but I'm sure I 'could' if I were dedicated enough to weed massacre or ensured my chickens were cleaned twice a week, or insisted on homemade everything from porridge to bread, or even had a cow that needed milking (taking three pints off my doorstep in ready made bottles doesn't even come close!

I think everyone should read Kristin's book, even if you can't bear the thought of getting muck behind your nails or eating something that lived on your land - be it once living and squawking (or mooing) or taking over your greenhouse or garden like something from Day of the Triffids and I'll tell you why;

If you are passionate about your food and what you put in your mouth, even slightly, then you should be supporting your local farmers. What they do is, frankly, awesome. To do hard, physical labour for more than 12 hours a day, 365 days of the year, with no guarantee of return some years....to work under the glare of the sun, the bite of the wind or the chill of the cold with nature having the final say, not you...is something that needs our support.

If you have a local veg scheme or CSA or farm shop, use it when you can. Join a pig or lamb share scheme. Our local butcher brings a mobile van into our village once a week. Or, try planting a few seeds in a window box so that you can really get a true taste for freshly picked food. The more people that demand heritage breed pork or local pesticide-free veg that looks like male genitalia (they don't sell these ones in some supermarkets, but believe you an me, at our dinner table, they're the ones we like most as they give us a real giggle!), or raw milk or home made sheep cheese and local honey; then the more the demand goes up and the more farmers will get support, the more they will need to use their fields to grow and the less they will need to sell them off to developers or put huge wind farms up that people moan about...

But you knew that didn't you ;-)

Roadtrip

We've been on a short roadtrip this half term, going up to Yorkshire to see my sis and her kids and then down to East Anglia to visit my folks and some friends.

As you can see from our photos, Thursday in Yorkshire resulted in a great 3 mile hike to a garden centre with cafe wearing raincoats and hats. We insisted on sitting outside and you can see the mist over the hills behind us.

Fast forward a few hours and a couple of hours south and we were out in the sunshine with my friend Emma and her gorgeous son at the Strawberry Fayre in Cambridge.

Now we're back home catching up with the chores that come with the last day of half term before back to school/work tomorrow.
Mr Beehive is somewhere up in the sky on his way to my second home, Connecticut. It always makes me feel a little nostalgic and sad when he goes Stateside as I realise just what such an amazing time we had over there and how much I miss some of my CT friends. As current things go, we won't be back over for quite sometime, but we are desperately collecting airmiles and hope to spend a good portion of time over there in the not too distant future. For now, we have to satisfy ourselves that he might manage a trip over to Trader Joe's and bring us back a few packs of Snap Pea crisps and Freeze Dried Strawberries!

I've been out in the garden since being back ensuring that the tomato plants my mum gave me are in, the cloches are now off the beans and courgettes and the stakes are in the cucumbers.

I think my blogging is going to be somewhat more erratic than usual over the next couple of months as I have my final Montessori Exams looming in July and there is such a lot to remember and learn before then, mix that in with it being the busiest time of year on the homestead, I may be doing more photojournalling and less chat.

Half term catch up

Did you see that?
We had sun!
For two Bank Holidays in a row now we have had sun!
And everyone wonders why the Brits do nothing but talk about the weather! That's because it's crazy man!! It is so changeable it gives you whiplash and therefore it needs discussing for future reference in case anyone manages to figure out a pattern to it. There would be a Nobel prize for that one I'm sure!

So after our second bank holiday with sun, today it is raining again. I have to say, I'm relieved, as I thought for a moment that I'd been transplanted somewhere Mediterranean and we'd then have nothing to talk about, weatherwise!

However, this has meant that we've thoroughly enjoyed the bank holiday weekend, visiting friends in their new home, enjoying sitting out on the patio and getting through the endless chores outside, that don't seem so endless when the sun is beating down on your back.

Mr Beehive has finally finished the chicken fort knox.
We now, with approval from the neighbours, have chicken wire up to the gods to prevent those wily Vulpes vulpes from getting in to snack on my chooks.
My poor husband is returning to work today looking as if he's been training as a Samurai!

I have managed to cut the lawns and the orchard - a mammoth task in itself, and feed the cuttings to the chickens (they adore picking through the freshly mown stuff), build another bean support (I must check today that it has witheld the rain last night as I have chosen to do a single style checker board rather than a wigwam or X frame), plant some more beans, harvest our first crop of rhubarb, salvage a pear tree that was in a pot a remnant of our travelling days and re plant it in the garden and mend the cold frame, remodelling it as another raised bed instead and planting kale in it.

I'm desperately hoping that this years harvest will far outweigh the measly offerings we had last year.
Should things go well we should be seeing:

Garlic ready for harvesting in around 3 weeks time
Courgettes
Potatoes
Runner and French beans
Radishes
Salad leaves
Nasturstium
Spinach
Tomatoes
Peppers
Cucumbers
Carrots
Purple Sprouting Broccoli
Pumpkins
Strawberries (these are amazingly resilient buggers, but I'm pretty sure the yield will be low)
Black and Redcurrants
Loganberries
Raspberries
Melon (we can but hope!)
Nectarines (well, maybe not this year)
Apples
Grapes (mmm?)

Mr Beehive has his autumn already lined up with his wine on the go, his cider in his twinkling sights!
I hope I'll be canning and preserving, so that by the time we get to September/October, what with our piglet from the litter being ready for collection from the butcher and we hope we will be able to get a lamb from our plumber (yup! I know, all the crew from the house renovations revealed the most wonderful sidelines. Our Plumber, Chris, owns a farm with his dad. Lucky I spotted the lamb feed in the skip that day and got chatting and our foreman gave us two chickens that he was looking to rehome!) we'll be set to minimise our visits to the supermarkets.

With the solar panels having had two, yes, that's right folks TWO days of bank holiday sunshine...we could actually be looking at being fairly self sufficient rolling from 2013 into 2014, fingers crossed.

Today, however, normality has been restored. It is raining, I can't take photos for you of the garden or foxknox! The dentist beckons the three mini Beehives along with trumpet and piano practices, an hour of revision for me and then...we may even have to light the woodburner this afternoon.

Normality has resumed, obviously!

Gratitude * Sunday

What I've felt grateful for this week:

• The depth of beautiful colours that are now continually blooming and changing through the garden.
• The occasional sunny day that lifts my spirits tremendously.
• A fabulous sweet pea climbing support that I found in an antique basement on Friday and compliments my garden incredibly.
• Our loyal customers for the eggs who continue to support us and pushed us past our second loss of two more hens this week and the nanosecond stab of doubt in my mind as to whether we should keep going. Also, included in this, is my darling husband who has spent most of his weekend up a ladder trying to install some kind of Fox krypton factor and slicing himself on wire ends!
• Boots, walks, fields and fabby boot racks!
• A top bargain potting table put together this afternoon by same fantastic husband, after he had completed an eight mile walk! It's not going to be a potting table as it sets off the deck too well with a few flowers on it!
• My Green Man who kept me company this morning whilst I sat outside on the deck with my scrappy quilt and hot steaming mug of coffee. I am grateful for the fact that, the morning after the night when I can't sleep, it is a Sunday morning where the dawn is bringing a warming sunshine even at 5.45am when I'm sitting huddled up with Kelle's book and I can spend an hour in my own company listening to the vocal choir in the trees.
• Mother and child makes me grateful for my own three, despite the bickering. The eldest who this week won a silver award for the national junior maths challenge, the middle one who finished his SAT's and took them in his stride and the little one who went to the Cotswold Wildlife Park today and brought back gifts for her siblings rather than spending all her money on herself. They are beautiful children and I'm so lucky to have been gifted them as their mama. Despite their growing years, they're still happy to allow me to cuddle with them and smell their hair.
• Rhubarb! I love rhubarb and ours seems to be doing really well this year. Woo Hoo!

What have YOU been grateful for this week?

Death on a Friday

Such is the life of living in the country with animals but last night we lost our first chicken to a fox. Sadly it was one of the beautiful blue Aracaunas that we hatched from an egg.
She and her sister roost up the tree, we have tried and tried to get them in the house at night, but they just don't like it, therefore, we feel that we should let nature take its course. Unfortunately Mother nature reminded us last night that she has control of everything and the silly bird obviously came down early in the dawn on the wrong side of the fence to a waiting foxy.

I suppose I should be grateful that we have had chickens for nearly three years now and not lost one yet to a fox, however, the little bugger (foxy that is) also decided to leave us all the feathers on the front door step and had obviously sat and eaten her under the magnolia tree ontop of a pile of my daffodils, so we now have a nice fox shaped flat reminder on the front flower bed - gah!

It is hard to lose an animal whether it's a chicken or another pet, it's also hard to explain to a small girl who has named them all, that one of them has met a sticky end.
LMB was quite upset over breakfast, so we tried to explain to her that it was all a huge cycle of life and that 'Millie' would now be back as food for her friends to eat so the cycle would continue.
Interestingly all LMB was interested in was whether or not Foxy would choke on Millie's leg ring. I have a feeling that sadistically, she kinda hoped he would!

RIP Millie :-(

'Custer's last stand' or at least her last roosting post up in that tree on the INSIDE of the fence.

Damn I'll miss those blue eggs!