Nothing much left to sell but still plenty to eat

After the big clear out consisting of  2 car boot sales(and another planned) 1 yard sale, 2 trips to the  scrap yard and delivering machinery and chicken sheds you would think we had found and sold everything we could.
Then Col was doing a bit more  sorting out his workshop and in a corner he discovered some lead which we think came from out of my dads sheds many, many years ago and is what's left from putting around the  chimney when it was rebuilt. There's not a huge amount, less than a carrier bag full, but obviously it weighs a lot so will add another few £ to the kitty when we deliver it to the scrap yard.
There's also not much left to sell from the garden, just tomatoes, beetroot and a few courgettes or marrows.
Thankfully we've still got plenty to eat from outside. Today we had  the first few Autumn raspberries, our lunchtime salad included  lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes and beetroot and our veggie curry for dinner has cauliflower,courgette, pepper, onion and potato. Then the last of the plums in a plum fool for Col's desert.

There are some things in the garden that will be ready soon 

The early eating apples, they look nice and rosy but one bite will tell you to wait a while longer!

The leeks are still a bit small, they could be eaten if we needed to.

Kale will sit there all through autumn and winter weather. It's become fashionable in gunge (otherwise known as nutri drinks!) but personally it's the last thing in the world I would mush up to drink and it's quite a way down my list of favourite veg too.

Lurking under leaves are a few squash, only enough for us this year - none to sell.
.Yesterday morning when it was cloudy Col did an hours tidying in the poly tunnel clearing out the lower leaves from the tomato plants to let the light in. You can see a few cucumbers in the background, we are saving them all for us.

 It was really chilly last night and we lit the wood-burner. I would much rather have our wood-burner than a central heating system because  it only takes a couple of sheets of newspaper, a few bits of kindling wood and a couple of logs and the room is warm for the whole evening. There's no wondering if it's worth switching the heating on or worrying about the cost, just simple free warmth.
We brought in a the last bag of kindling  so today I went out to the shed to start my regular job of chopping kindling for fire lighting. We've got the boards from part of an old shed that we rescued from a friend ready to be cut sometime so plenty to last all winter.

There were black clouds all around us today but no rain so far. Col took our elderly friend up to Norwich hospital again yesterday and drove through showers all the way back but we had no rain at all here.

Library Book day tomorrow- Good

Back soon
Sue

Being pushed towards a decision

Once again health issues are forcing us to think about our future.

A couple of weeks ago Col had an overnight stay in hospital for a small investigative operation in the Urology Department ( nuf said about that!). What he was told afterwards was no driving and no heavy lifting for 2 weeks. They did say that some people may need 4 - 6 weeks off work. Of course he didn't think  HE was one of those people. But he should have been because on Sunday evening another problem meant a quick dash to hospital and a 2 night stay with some quite nasty procedures - Ouch. Anyway he is home again and OK-ish but really must take things easy for a while.
This means that the man who had never been in hospital before 2013 has now been "inside" 7 times, and after each hospital stay we say we must cut down on what we do here, because of the way things are set up this is definitely a  two person smallholding.

We've decided that the chicken numbers will be cut again down to just enough for us and our neighbours and no pumpkins and squash will be grown out on the field after all. Once our youngest daughter has sorted out a flat rental and our eldests' wedding has been and gone -  the smallholding will go up for sale - probably!. All the internal decorating and tidying has been done and much of Col's might-come-in-handy stuff that fills the workshop could easily go in a skip, so really we are ready. We both fancy a move to somewhere completely different for a while and if we buy a house in a Suffolk town to rent out for income we will have somewhere to come back to in a few years time if needs be.

Meanwhile apart from all the mental turmoil that comes from having to decide what to do next things are relatively normal.

We are enjoying several delicious meals from the garden. Imagine home made bread toast covered with scrambled eggs with deep yellow yolks fresh from our hens and topped with our own asparagus spears. Followed by strawberries from the poly tunnel. Or we could have, also from the poly-tunnel, salad leaves with some chopped crunchy radishes and warm new potatoes mixed with a little mayo with rhubarb fool as a dessert.

The poly tunnels are all planted up.
Luckily Col had finished the job of staking the tomatoes in the big poly-tunnel before his unexpected  hospital stay.

I haven't actually counted how many tomato plants we have, I know there are 5 different types. Over on the right are 7 cucumber plants. I hope we can sell all their produce  without having eggs out on the stand to draw people in.

The middle poly-tunnel has salad leaves and radishes with the strawberries in growbags raised up on planks on benches. The potatoes we are eating are from the plants on the right, planted as soon as we got them from The Potato Day on Feb 14th. In the left hand bed are all the peppers and aubergines.

We are not growing much in the small tunnel as it is now too shady and dry from the trees. There is a circle of French Climbing beans at the back, a very sparse crop of early beetroot in front. On the left are more cucumbers in pots. Runner beans in trays and there are leeks too in pots waiting for better weather. Right at the front, all that green stuff that looks like grass is actually Garlic Chives. Whatever I do I can't get it to stop growing in here, it's very invasive and extremely hardy. Useful for Pesto too.

Not much has been done outside except I got the strawberry and raspberry beds weeded  yesterday and I've been checking for Gooseberry sawfly most days although we had that blasted  North East wind back again today and it's been really cold. No one on the campsite today so I got instructions for grass cutting and got half the site done, it wasn't a very warm job.

Two more books have been added to my Books Read In 2015 page, namely  Shadow of The Hangman by Edward Marston and Holy Spy by Rory Clements. The first was dreadful! I don't know why I bothered to finish it. Edward Marston churns out two or three of books a year. He has done many series of historical crime  starting with The Elizabethan Theatre series in the 80's through to The Railway Detective series with a new one of those due out next month. I fear just lately quality has been lost.
Holy Spy by Rory Clements is the 7th in the John Shakespeare series, set in Elizabethan England John Shakespeare is an intelligencer working for Sir Francis Walsingham on behalf of the Queen. This story is about the plot against Elizabeth by Mary, and her Catholic friends.

That's brought things up to date here and we are round to Mobile library day again tomorrow.

Back Soon
Sue

February weather sayings + a book reading link

Today, February 2nd is Candlemas Day, a church festival which happens to coincide with the Celtic feast of Imbolc, a day to linked to lambing and new life.
There are many weather sayings for Feb and the best known is probably
February Fills The Dyke
Be it Black or Be it White

This year the dykes ( rivers/ditches/drains) are already full with plenty of black(rain) and no sign here of any white(snow). Half term week is sometimes very cold and snowy so we shall see what happens. Several rhymes tell farmers to check their stores because
In the barn on Candlemas Day 
Should be half the straw and half the hay
In other words there could be half the winter still to come.
And
If  Candlemas Day be fine and clear
Then half the winter's to come this year. 

At the beginning of January I did a list of what food of our own we have available so for the beginning of February this is the list
From Store - Beetroot, eating apples,cooking apples,onions,squash
From The Garden - Cabbage, Brussels sprouts, a little chard, parsley, parsnips,leeks and a few tiny swedes.( purple sprouting broccoli soon)
From The Freezer - Broad beans, sweetcorn, peppers, cooking apples, pears, gooseberries, small amounts of other fruit.
Jam and chutney - As Last Month see here
 

I started reading a new-to-me blog called The Quince Tree ( another lady called Sue- how common we are!) I'm not sure why I haven't added this lovely colourful blog to my reading list before. She has a link to another site- The Circle of Pines - Year of Books. 70 bloggers have linked into this so that means 70 new ideas for reading each month. Sue very kindly explained how to add the link onto my blog - over on the right. So I shall be doing a post  about my favourite book that I have read each month - although I think I might find it difficult to choose!

These are  the books that I brought home from the library van just after Christmas, so these are what I read in January.

My favourites were
James Oswald - Natural Causes, because this is a new author and well written crime.
Angela Thirkell - High Rising, because this is a reprint of a book from the 30's and is very witty.
Jacky Hyams - The bomb girls,  because this is the story of the girls who made munitions during WWII and something I had not read about before.

Below is the picture of library books brought home in January

   I have already read and enjoyed Love Nina by Nina Stibbe. This is non fiction and are letters written by Nina in the early 1980s when she was a Nanny in London. She writes to her sister in Leicestershire, very amusing letters about the children, their mother and the visitors to the house including the playwright Alan Bennett who lives close and comes around for supper quite often.
I've also read The Anne Perry and the Carola Dunn which are both new historical crime fiction in a series. Anne Perry writes well and seriously whereas Carola Dunn's books are much lighter slightly frothy books.
I've already picked up ideas for two other books to order from the library from the Year of Books link, which is good.

We have now had 2 sunny days in a row- good gracious, a rare event!
 

January stores and January Weather

 Up until the spring of last year I wrote regularly for our local Suffolk Smallholders Society monthly newsletter. One year I did a page each month called " Country Days and Country Ways". I used  information from some of my many ( too many!) books of  weather sayings and country traditions.
I thought it would be fun to do the same now and again on the blog during 2014.

So here's a weather saying for the start  of the year

The first three days of January foretell the first three months of the year.

We shall see. 

 Yesterday as the weather was so wet, cold, grey and windy,  I made a start on my plan to clear out some things from the craft room. I filled a boxful with cross stitch kits that I will NEVER do, card toppers that I will NEVER use and other bits and bobs that have been lurking for years. The result only made half a shelf of less stuff. But I felt better! The box has gone upstairs to join our collection of things for a car boot sale.

After lunch, egg collecting and packing. I looked to see what was on TV....... Nothing. Old films and more old films. So when Him Outside came in I suggested we have our first game of Scrabble of the winter.
At the end it looked like this

We use a scrabble dictionary and cheat by looking up words in it before we lay the tiles. It's full of strange words that don't appear in The Shorter OED. We've now discovered that we have a letter Y missing. I think I'll have to make one from something.
 Despite my QUAIL on a triple word, I only won by 1 point.
We need some practice in case we get a chance to play a game with Him Outsides' sister - a demon Scrabble player!

It was good to make the first entry in my new diary - which is just an A4 note pad, I don't like the constraints of a normal diary. ( Although I keep a week to view one in the kitchen for reminders) I need blank pages for planning things, lists etc, and I like to start at the front and at the back!
Yesterday I made a list of all the food of our own we have available here on January 1st.
It looked like this
From Store - Beetroot, potatoes, onions, squash, cooking apples, eating apples.
From the garden - Cabbage, Brussels sprouts, leeks, parsnips. A few lettuce, radishes and salad leaves, a little chard and some golf ball sized swedes. ( + Sprouting broccoli soon)
From the freezer - Broad Beans, sweetcorn, peppers, pears, cooking apples, raspberries, gooseberries, cherries. Plus a few redcurrants and plum tomatoes.
In the kitchen cupboards - Jam - Marrow and ginger, Summer fruits, Plum, Greengage, Gooseberry, Strawberry and Gooseberry.
Chutneys - Pumpkin and pepper, Beetroot and Ginger, Hot tomato, Sweetcorn relish,Green Tomato,Onion Marmalade chutney,Gooseberry and date, Marrow and apple.


 Today after lots more heavy rain overnight, the weather is completely different  with bright sunshine and a clear blue sky and  I soon had  two loads of washing blowing on the line.
 Him Outside was working for the County Council this morning and I was in the kitchen making pies with the remainder of the beef stew we had for dinner yesterday. I cooked up a 2 packs of the meat ( 3 packs stewing beef for £10) used some value carrots from Tesco, and leeks, onions and swede from the garden,  added  stock using a couple of beef oxo cubes, hot water and a can of beer. This was simmered on the Rayburn, thickened with Bisto. We ate this last night with dumplings and Brussels Sprouts. The remainder has made 3 pies, each serving the two of us.  One for tonight and 2 for the freezer. We rarely eat beef so this is the best way to stretch it as much as possible.
Then I did a lot of hoovering and more tidying after which it was lunch time and egg collecting all over again.

I'm feeling a bit left out today as most people in blogland seem to be embarking on New Adventures and New Challenges.  Whereas here we will just be chugging along in our normal simple way.


 Although I do have a cunning plan to save any spare housekeeping towards one of these!

 

The iconic ‘Revival’ DAB radio is a nostalgic 1950s style retro radio with advanced DAB features.


I shall let you know how I get on.

I keep forgetting to say Thank you for lots of comments over the last few days, apologies for not replying to everyone individually also welcome to follower number 115 in the pictures and a couple more people on bloglovin.

Back tomorrow - Keeeeep Frugaling!