September Saturday

Lots of rain during the night, more than we have had for three and a half months and still raining through the early part of the morning. So we decided it was just right for getting in the poly tunnels and having a good sort out. Weeds were removed and tipped in the chicken run, loads of dead leaves from tomato plants were put on the trailer for burning and all sorts of other bits were added to the compost bin. A bucket full of squishy or damaged tomatoes will be fed to the new chickens over the next few days. So a really good mornings work.

I had a cancellation from people due on the campsite - put off by the weather forecast and a campervan booked in for three nights decided just to pay for one and then go home - again due to the weather. There is a caravan due to arrive tomorrow for a week, I'm now wondering if they too will cancel.

Looking through new posts on my regular blog reading list I saw Frugal Queen had one titled" What have you done financially lately?". She has suggested that everyone takes a look at 10 areas of spending and tries to reduce them.
 It  made me smile when I realised that there was really nothing in her list that had any relevance to us at all. Her ideas were
1. Check you mobile phone contract.  WE HAVE PAY AS YOU GO = £10  now and again
2.Paying for watching dozens of TV channels? NO
3.Make sure you get points for petrol. THIS IS ONLY RELEVANT IF YOU LIVE SOMEWHERE WHERE YOU HAVE THAT CHOICE.
4.Don't spend supermarket rewards on food, swap them for other things. THIS IS ONLY RELEVANT IF YOU HAVE LOTS AND ACTUALLY NEED CLOTHES, AIR MILES ETC
5.Share transport to work. WE WORK AT HOME
6.Sell surplus stuff on ebay. TRY NOT TO BUY SURPLUS STUFF IN THE FIRST PLACE
7. Cut car costs by finding a reliable garage.TRY TO DO REPAIRS AND SERVICING AT HOME
8.Swap Energy companies.FEW ARE INTERESTED IF YOU ARE NOT DUEL FUEL. FREE WOOD ANYWAY!
9.Pay off credit card debts. WE DON'T HAVE ANY DEBT.
10.Stock-take food cupboards.I ALREADY  KNOW WHAT'S THERE.

Just confirms what I thought. We ARE frugal! I'm a  Smug B****r too!
   
WE DON'T GO OUT TO WORK

Green Tomato chutney recipe

Thank you to everyone for comments on yesterdays blog, Some I haven't got around to replying to - Sorry!
Welcome to new readers, especially when you say you enjoy reading my ramblings!

A lovely day here again, although the weather men predicted rain for yesterday we only had an early morning shower, so still VERY dry and a strong breeze here today will dry things up even more. No good for plumping up the apples.

I finished making the green tomato chutney this morning. It is an old, simple recipe and makes a type of chutney that is good with cheese or dolloped into a curry.
It comes from a very old cookery book, the sort that actually has more recipes than pages, unlike the glossy celebrity cookbooks nowadays that have a huge photo on every other page. My copy is tatty with splodges and spills on all the pages but as I've had it for nearly 40 years that's not surprising.
By the way you will find I always do recipes in imperial rather than metric. That's how my brain works! I'm English rather than European!! 

Mucky pages - shows it's well used!

Green  Tomato Chutney

5lb Green Tomatoes
1lb onions
2tablespoons salt
1lb sugar
2 pints spiced vinegar
1lb sultanas( or half and half sultanas and raisins)
1lb cooking apples

Slice tomatoes and chop onions and mix in a basin with the salt, cover with a tea towel and leave to stand overnight
Next day tip the tomatoes and onions into a colander and leave to drain, the salt draws out lots of water.
Put the vinegar and sugar into a preserving pan  and heat slowly, stirring to dissolve sugar
When its just boiling add sultanas and apples and simmer for a few minutes.
Add the strained tomatoes and onions and simmer until thick - about 1 hour.
Pot into sterlised jars and seal.

It made plenty to last all year.
In the cupboard from last year I still have 3 jars of Pumpkin and pepper, 5 Marrow and Apple, 3 Gooseberry and Date, 1 Courgette and sultana and 2 Onion"Marmalade" . Then the new jars of Red Hot Relish made the other day and now these 9 jars of Green Tomato. I still want to make Beetroot and Ginger, Sweetcorn Relish and maybe just a few jars of one or two other sorts.
That will give me enough for presents and for us.

We started putting the Damson/Cooking plums out for sale and they fairly flew off the stall and we picked about 4lb of the eating ( Victoria?) plums that seem to be riper than the rest. 3lb were stoned and put into the freezer and the rest will be snacked on - delicious.

This afternoon I carried on pruning the gooseberries. When I say pruning that sounds as if I know what I'm doing. But really I have only  a vague idea that a gooseberry bush should look like a wine glass on a stem. Ours look nothing like that!  So I take out any dead bits, anything very low to the ground, any branches that seem to be going in the wrong direction and I also trim the tips of some of the very long branches and try to make a gap between the bushes.  Him Outside came to help so that we could get the job finished. He said that two people who didn't know what they were doing was probably not as good as one person who did. Although I think they look tidier now and a bit better air flow through the bushes can't do them any harm.
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I have brought two Conference pears in to see if it's right what someone ( sorry can't remember who without searching back) said that they will ripen well off the tree so should be picked earlier rather than later. They usually get ruined by wasps so if I can save a few for us it will be a good thing.

Strictly starts tonight - Good news indeed.  I love seeing how they progress through the months.

Think that's all for today
Back tomorrow.

Good news at last - fingers crossed.

Him Outside should be having a CT scan tomorrow morning and off to Papworth in the afternoon. I say should, because you never know with hospitals. With luck he will be home by the end of the week,which will be good as it is beginning to get a bit lonely here.
I thought I had an empty campsite tonight and then two phone calls- first was for a group of friends in 3 motorhomes probably just for tonight, maybe tomorrow too and second was for someone who suddenly had the chance to get away for 4 nights-Very handy bookings. Then a couple on cycles turned up with a tent for the night. So from no one to lots all at once!
Spent part of the morning,( after the picking and packing of veg to sell) making some strawberry and gooseberry jam. It is a brilliant combination as the gooseberries make the strawberry set. I used 4 pound of strawbs and 2 pound goosegogs. Cook separately to start with and if you cook the gooseberries down to pulp then they mix in to the strawberries and sugar without anyone knowing there are gooseberries in it. Clever!
I needed to get the jam done to make room in the freezer for cherries and later for apples. The cherries are morello cooking cherries so are very sharp. Some years the blackbirds move in but they've left them alone so far this year. I tried making jam with them one year and they were still sharp. Now I put some in the freezer to mix with apples in crumbles or pies and then sell the rest. They are such a pain to prepare as the stones need removing and however I do it I always seem to get me and the kitchen covered in cherry juice.
We had about five minutes of rain- gee whiz. Everybody who came on site said they had driven through thunderstorms and heavy rain and here we are on the edge of Suffolk and nothing. So when the sun goes down I will be out there yet again watering as much as I have energy to do. Even worse we have strong wind which will just dry the topsoil even more.
Finally got around to taking a photo of my hollyhocks now coming into flower. These are some I bought from a cheap catalogue to fill our new flower bed. The 'annuals in a container' that I mentioned several weeks ago which we got to fill up the spaces didn't work. I guess the new bed didn't have fine enough soil for the seeds to get going.There are now a few weedy marigolds and many more weedy weeds! Must get the hoe out if only I had a minute to spare. ( More hoeing less blogging maybe!)

And finally a warm welcome to new readers and followers and thank you for all the good wishes for Him Outside. Perhaps in a weeks time I will not have to mention hospitals or arteries ever again.

Blue sky thinking

Here was my view for an hour this afternoon as I 'forced' myself to do nothing.

I saw swallows and swifts, herring gulls and goldfinches,dragonflies and butterflies, a kestrel and a buzzard. Way up higher I saw metal boxes full of people flying off to foreign parts. Silly fools!

Coming under the heading of things we never buy this is what we had for dinner last night

First of the french beans - so delicious.

A message for all those who are getting themselves into a tizzy, worrying about what they should and shouldn't eat, what they should and shouldn't do, what other people will think, LIFE'S TOO SHORT

Don't Worry- Be Happy!

Jam Today

I started the day by using up some odd bags of fruit that were still in the freezer and made some jars of Summer Fruit Jam. I used 2lb gooseberries, just under 2lb redcurrants, a small bag of raspberries and a few fresh strawberries that we didn't eat yesterday.

Then I stretched half a pound of mince to make a cottage pie for today and a spaggi. bol. to put in the freezer for next week.
These jobs made lots of washing up by which time it was almost lunch time. So I nipped out to pick a few more strawberries and found that the sun yesterday had ripened lots more so that we had them for dinner too.
A bit of a wander round with the camera to take some garden pictures.

And finally, after  all the usual egg and campsite jobs, time for a Friday afternoon sit down to finish another good book.
A new discovery spotted on the shelves of the mobile library last Friday.

Turns out to be 5th in a crime series set in 1733. Now I need to find the earlier books and order them from the library ready for me to pick up next month.
That's my Simple Suffolk Friday. Cost = nothing. Satisfaction = Lots!

PS. Just editing this post to say that I've just found some comments from blogging friends on a blog a couple of days ago, that I didn't know were there . So apologies for not replying before, will do it now!

Three Cheers For The First New Potatoes!

Here is a picture that is a pleasing sight.

These are our first early potatoes dug today. The variety is Swift and this plus 3 larger ones that I quickly cooked for a potato salad for lunch are all from one root. This means we don't have to buy anymore potatoes. How good is that!
More signs of hopefulness on a cold June Sunday.

Tiny Plums have set.

Gooseberries are growing.

We might beat the blackbirds to the Morello cherries.

Our Green Man is still watching over some trees we planted 8 years ago.

Now settling down to watch mens tennis Final from Paris, plus doing a bit of  cross stitching.

(PS thank you to everyone for comments yesterday and welcome to Wendy at Blue Borage)

I know more than I want to know about agricultural waste exemptions!

This morning I 'lost' three quarters of an hour of my life  registering for New Agricultural Waste Exemptions on the Environment Agency web site.
Because we have land rather than just a garden and we are a registered smallholding we have to comply with waste regulations. Normal things like having a bonfire, building a compost heap or cleaning a ditch, which more or less everyone with a garden can do without any problems, we have to fill in a blinkin' form on the computer!
We had to do all this about 10 years ago and then re-register every now and again. But now they've jigged about with all the exemptions so we had to start from scratch. EVENTUALLY after ringing them up to find out why we couldn't get any further than  the first page and then having to search for a grid reference on another website and then going backwards and forwards from page to page. I clicked on the Submit bit and hopefully we are now legal. At present there is no charge for all this but I can just imagine that sometime in the future someone in a city office will have an idea to bring in more money and will start charging us.
 I think the most annoying thing is that the HUGE farmers like the ones who farm 10s of thousands of acres all around us and for miles right down to Essex, have to fill in exactly the same form as we do with our little 5 acres and a compost heap! And they can employ someone to do all their paperwork for them.
Yesterday and today the  sun is shining here on the edge of Suffolk but by golly the wind is cold. It's a north easterly so we are feeling the worst of it straight off the sea. Yesterday Him Outside worked for a customer in the morning and then cut the campsite grass ( sitting on the ride on mower isn't causing him any strain) and I got the small mower out to do all the fiddly bits of grass cutting. Today we've got lots more odd bits of gardening done mainly weeding and tidying and Him Outside was in the poly tunnel taking the side shoots off the tomatoes until it got too warm.
 Here's a nice sight- tidy ranks of healthy onions

 He managed to get in to see the doctor yesterday to get more advice on all the tablets that the hospital dished out without any discussion after the angina diagnosis, but when he stopped the tablet that gave him a headache he got the serious pains again and had to use the under the tongue spray for the first time. It's all such a sudden thing we don't know what he should be doing and what not to do.
I suppose he will get sorted out eventually.
Yesterday, at last, I picked up my needle and started a quick and easy cross stitch picture for a card and also got into the first few pages of Confusion- the third in the Cazalet family saga by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Finally I must say welcome to Dragonfly, a new local visitor to my blog. Thank you also to everyone for comments and advice re the angina issue - we need all the advice we can get I think!

Friday job - weeding the garden.

Thanks to Bridget at Malbridge house who said yesterday that perhaps I would wake up today and find it was summer and I did!
It actually took a couple of hours for the sun to work it's way through the clouds but since then its been 14 degrees warmer than yesterday and I'm back in shorts - not a pretty sight.
When Him Outside went to hospital a couple of weeks back for tests, I went too, just in case the nasty stomach camera thing made him feel ill. But we decided it was a waste of good weather for me to go with him today as he was 'just' going to the chest pain clinic for ECG on a treadmill  to confirm the previous diagnosis of Angina and to find out what they would do next.
So I got busy outside and tackled a corner of the garden that I haven't took photo's of before, as it was a mess. It was over-run with Tansy, which has never been planted in this area so came in by seeding from another bit of garden about 8 yards away. WARNING if you ever fancy planting a herb garden with unusual herbs, DO NOT plant Tansy! Unless you would like lots of tansy all over the place and as it smells horrible why would you? The problem is that it spreads by running roots so even though I've pulled up every bit I could see, I probably can't get rid of it except by digging up the whole bed.

The bottom photo is a close up of tansy where it is growing at the bottom of a trellis arch and that is my next place to tidy up.

Him Outside arrived back from Ipswich Hospital mid afternoon with a more or less definite diagnosis of angina and clutching a bundle of boxes of tablets which he will now have to take daily. This is such a weird thing as when I started this blog just a couple of months ago the only thing wrong with him was a dodgy knee that would ache when rain was approaching. Now he gets chest pains when doing anything involving shoveling or lifting heavy things and we may have to change a lot of things that we do here.With the thought now in the back of our minds that we might not be able to stay and work a 5 acre smallholding for quite as long as we had planned. He will be back to hospital for more tests within 8 weeks.
The flowers on the quince tree have now opened, they are so pretty. How did I manage to take a photo without getting a flower in the middle of the picture? what a twit! Put glasses on next time!

I know that I need my glasses on for lots more things now as this is the first year that I've needed them  to check the gooseberry bushes for the tell tale signs of sawfly caterpillar.
Seems old age is creeping up on both of us!