Wednesday 4 March 2015

March Winds

Well, March really did come in like a lion with some rough weather overnight between Saturday and Sunday and strong bitterly cold winds ever since. One gust on Monday blew over a wheelie bin, a small tree in a pot, a wheelbarrow and an empty water butt all at once - I wondered what on earth was happening!

We celebrated the start of March with our once a year trip up the A12 to the Car Boot sale at Kessingland. (We have to wait 'til Easter for our local car boots to start ). Usually this boot sale is huge but there were hardly any boots there. I bought nothing but Col got a big bundle of sandpaper sheets for 50p. After checking our March shopping list on My Supermarket comparison site I found Asda had several of the things we needed cheaper than anywhere else, so after a walk along the sand on Lowestoft beach we shopped there and saved several £ over Tesco prices. 

My favourite March weather saying is " March- month of many weathers". You never quite know what it will be like, there are bound to be a few days that say spring is here yet on the other hand we could still get some snow. My mum always used to tell us about the March day she got married  back in the fifties when they had everything - snow, hail, rain and sunshine too. Does nature know that we might have snow? The reason I ask is outside in the garden things are just so slow this year. Thankfully the seedlings in the conservatory are doing well except for the blasted peppers, three sowings and only 6 germinated! I've got  50+ tomato ( 4 different sorts) seedlings and 8 Aubergines. I'm hanging fire with cucumbers until later in the month. Col has sown beetroot, lettuce, salad leaves and radish in the poly tunnel and these are the first beetroot harvested this year from the late summer sowing in the poly.

and look what else was spied in the poly-tunnel.............
our bargain strawberry plants in the bargain grow bags, and the first one on flower. ( There's no sign of flowers on any of the other plants so it will be a very small early harvest!)


 This is one of 4 items  found in the jumble sale we went to on the last day of February. Lucky for me that someone bought a new hardback book in 2014 for £16.99 and then put it into a jumble sale, where I came along and found it for 50p.  This book isn't part of his Isle of Lewis crime series but a stand alone novel which I didn't know about. It kept me glued to it through the first few days of March.
( All the books I have read so far this year are listed on a separate page - click on Books Read in 2015 on the header picture)

One of my first March jobs was to sort the chest freezers and squash everything into one. The other is defrosted, cleaned and turned off until fruit growing season. We have also tackled the campsite recreation room/library, it's had a dusting and been swept out and books put back on shelves. I'm waiting for the company that supplies tourist leaflets to email with this years list of what's available. There are just a few jobs to do before we re-open, dustbins to go outside, signs to go up, the toilets/basins to have another wipe-down and loo rolls added. We have 3 bookings for Easter weekend already. Fingers crossed for not too much rain between now and then.

Tuesday was shopping in Saxmundham - nothing exciting - just the stuff that Asda didn't have or things that are cheaper in Tesco. I went in a bit later than usual so as to go to the library which doesn't open until 10. I found another of the books that the British Library have recently published in the British Crime Classics Series and........ great excitement ...........for 30p, off the For Sale shelf a copy of Paths Of The Air by Alys Clare to add to my collection. ( 2 books have been moved to the car boot boxes to make up for this extravagance!)

We always know when our neighbour is away because when her bird feeders don't get filled, all the blue tits and great tits come over to ours. Col hung all the feeders in one place and sat for ages trying to get a good picture ( that man has too much time on his hands!) My camera doesn't really do it justice.

One of the things we definitely decided after Col's  hardly-a-heart-attack last October was to stop keeping hundreds of chickens. Cleaning out 3 big sheds was quite hard work. So on Tuesday, after a friend had the some of the oldest ones we just have one shed of hens left.  Col's job  was to clear up the electric fence and all the other bits and tow the shed down the field ready to be cleared out, pressure washed and then probably sold. There are still so many things about the future that we need to decide - the big one being do we stay here and see how we get on with just the campsite  and a few other bits of income or do we move to somewhere smaller and also buy another small house or flat  to rent out for an income. The best time to try and sell would be during spring/summer, but this year or next? ( I did a couple of posts about this last year and we are no further forward than we were then!)

We will just keep thinking about it for a while longer.


 Welcome to a new follower on Google Friends - DebShireGardener who has a blog called Rustic Pumpkin's garden in the shire and also welcome to Debbie on Bloglovin'.

The weather is supposed to be a bit warmer by the weekend, I hope it is.
Back in a few days
Sue


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