Summer arrived yesterday and another year older today!

The first swallow was spotted on Wednesday morning, first by Col on his way back from our neighbours and a bit later by me sitting at my desk while making a start on the dreaded Self Employment Short Tax Return. Campsite income was so good last year that I may have to pay tax - Bother and Blow!

The sun was shining and we got the strawberries weeded

 took the fleece off the onions

 Everything started to grow after two days of warmth. The leaves and "candles" on the Horse Chestnut.

This shrub is flowering, I think it is one of the Virburnam family

 After a slow start the Rhubarb is really growing well, the bottomless dustbin is forcing one clump.

The leaves are appearing on the Red Hazel

And look what we have in the poly tunnel - only a few but it's a start, they are in growbags up off the ground but still the ants have moved in, hence the ant powder

Today I had a "bit of a birthday", the rest of my birthday will be on Saturday afternoon when we are having "a bit of a do!"
Col and our children have all clubbed together  to get me a new camera (which will arrive with the family on Saturday) but he also surprised me with a gift of  sealing wax and an S seal which I will be using on my letters - how posh is that! My friend Mary sent me a book with a 'cheery' title, and I had lots of beautiful cards from relatives and pen-friends.

Had I been born a couple of weeks earlier I would now be getting my pension but as the goalposts have been moved I shall have to wait until I'm 66 - At least prescriptions and an eye test are now free. As a famous blogger would say " Hey Ho!"

Welcome to new followers - Homemaker Tales on Google and Sarah,Jenny and Lynda on Bloglovin

Back in a day or two

Sue

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

Knock Knock, who's there? Lucy. Lucy who?

Lucy Lastic!
That's what happened to a pair of my leggings, so I spent a while this morning  turning over the top, where the loose elastic had been stitched in, stitching it down and threading in a new bit. I have come to the end of a huge bundle of elastic that I picked up at a car boot sale about 10 years ago. I'd better remember to add elastic to my shopping list as you never know when you will need it.
I also mended a couple of big tears in Cs overalls to keep them useful for a while longer. Mending was the perfect job for a day where the rain started at 1am and carried on for 11 hours virtually non stop. The field was quickly waterlogged.

My other job this morning was making a double batch of Tomato and Herb rolls.

 I'm sure I've posted the recipe already but it's not labelled under recipes so this is it if anyone wants to try them.

 Yesterday I made Naan Bread and we cleaned out the empty chicken shed, so that's 3 things off my November Plan list from last Sundays post.

I said the other day that we never worry about the postman coming and this morning he brought all sorts of interesting things. 2 were items ordered for Christmas gifts, the latest Home Farmer Magazine for me to review ( they must have put me down for a whole years subscription for free - Goodness me!) and finally a box saying Live Plants..... at last the 24 Strawberry Plants had arrived. They were free except for postage from Junes issue of Home Farmer - that was a copy I had bought for myself!
 We got some cheap grow bags from B & Q several months ago because we want to grow the strawberries in the poly-tunnel but up above ground level. C has planted them up today with each grow bag on an old scaffold board. They will sit outside until late winter then we will move them into the poly tunnel. I'm not sure if this will work or maybe they should be under cover straight away? We will see what happens.

Right, The delivery man has just brought the AF order so I'm off to unpack it and put everything away before dinner.
Back Tomorrow
Sue
PS Thanks for all the interesting comments yesterday about Christmas hampers and shopping catalogues.

The First Strawberries of 2014.

A lovely good rain yesterday evening gave the garden a much needed
watering. Unfortunately we had a blip with our water-catching-moving-round-the-garden system. The heavy rain must have forced one of the hosepipes up and out of the tank it was in, so several hundred litres were in a big puddle at the end of the sheds instead of in the tanks. Luckily it had filled up most of the other tanks before it went wrong.
I'm so glad I didn't bother with being a Polling Clerk today as I've been operating on about 60% of normal energy all day and even ended up having a couple of hours reading this afternoon- and the sun was shining and I could have been doing something useful outside. I couldn't even summon up the energy to bike to the polling station and I certainly wasn't going to use good diesel to go and vote.
I don't often miss voting unlike someone we know in the family who has reached the age of 55 without ever entering a polling station!

In case you were thinking our first cucumbers from the poly-tunnel were super-duper huge and straight, this  was one of the two we've had. All small cucumbers have now been pinched out so the main shoot can grow a lot longer and produce lots of side shoots and lots more cucumbers.

And here are our first strawberries, lots of manky bits needed cutting off but it was still a treat for so early in the year. We were able to cover both the strawberry beds and the raspberry bed this morning. Another job done, and I washed another lot of flower pots and stacked them away ready for next year.

Twice I've forgotten to thank all blogging friends for comments over the last few days, much appreciated and I do read all of them. Welcome to a new follower- Treelover- on Google friends.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

We were waiting for rain

We need to get the  two beds of strawberries strawed and netted as they are already turning red. We gave them a good watering one day last week and then when rain was forecast for yesterday C said we'll wait until it's rained and then cover them. But yesterdays rain ended up being a 10 minute shower. Rain was forecast for this morning too, but it was fine. So I picked off the ripest strawberries anyway.  The strawbs I picked are pretty poor looking specimens, dry weather and ants have already affected them, they are from plants that are 3 and 4 years old and we probably need to make a new bed. The other bed has plants that are first and second year. We've been debating if we should  have new plants every other  year, planted in grow-bags on raised tables in the poly tunnels.This is how professional growers get good quality early crops. We don't sell strawberries at the moment mainly because the amount and quality are not good enough. But to have enough to sell we would need a large outlay for growbags, C could botch some raised tables/frames to put them on and we could use runners from our plants.Would it be worth the time and trouble to do this for just a few for us? Another problem is that they would be in the way for planting out tomatoes.
And we are NOT having a 4th tunnel!

C was gardening for one of his customers this morning and I had a big bake of shortcakes (recipe here) and plain buns with a water icing and sprinkles. These have been divided into boxes and popped into the freezer ready for C and should keep him in cakes for weeks.

Yesterday I noticed the Hollyhocks had yellow spotty blotches all over them and C's customer had some the same. She said it's a disease called rust and the plants need digging up and burning. Apparently overwintered plants now nearly always get this, shame, as I love Hollyhocks. I've now got 3 large gaps in the flower border.

On Sunday I put a picture on the blog of the herb chopper thing bought from the boot-sale. It's RUBBISH and USELESS! The herbs are pushed around the shallow bowl and  just fall out. I shall go back to putting herbs in a mug and using scissors and the herb chopper will go back into a boot sale - when we eventually get up the enthusiasm to do one. So £2 wasted - stupid woman!

Just as I finished writing this it started raining. Good, we need it and tomorrow we WILL get those strawberries covered.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Yet another car boot bargain

First of all I must give a warm welcome to new followers in the little pictures over there on the right, I hope you enjoy my ramblings from the Simple Suffolk Smallholding.

Those of you who have been following for a while will know that we love car boot sales. We go and look every other Sunday between April and October. We never come home with bags and bags of STUFF as we are only looking for things we need, things we know will be used in the future and things that are suitable as Christmas gifts.

Two weeks ago it was the work boots for Him Outside which he has been wearing and says they are the most comfortable he has ever had. Probably because they are really good quality and would have been at least £50 new, whereas if he goes to buy new ones from the work-wear supplier he would be wanting to spend around £35 at the most.
And the Epson Ink Cartridges which we don't need right this minute but we will need before too long and at £10 instead of £45ish they were a good bargain too.

Today my bargain was this  12 hole bun tin which was only 50p !

Not the most exciting picture to be found on a blog today!

  I do have one already but this will take up no room in the kitchen and will be handy for doing a bigger mince pie bake at Christmas. I suppose I didn't really NEED it but when I do need a replacement for my old one it will cost a lot more than 50p.
I also bought 3 new large pudding basins for £2 each. These will be used for Christmas Puddings to be given as gifts. I've been looking all year for some good second hand ones with no luck, but these were less than half price of new ones in the shops.
That was my shopping done for the day. There is only one more boot sale this season and then it will be the long wait until next year. I get withdrawal symptoms for weeks!

Because I want to do some more chutney making next week I had a good sort out of a big box of jam jars that were in the shed so as to match them up with the few remaining new lids that are left. I've made a mental note to call in at the packaging place to get a load of new lids of various sizes next time we are in that part of Suffolk. There's nothing more annoying than washing up jars ready for jam making only to find you have no lids to fit. We are so lucky to have a company that does all sorts of useful stuff like this not too far away. If you are wondering why I use new lids, it's because I've done food hygiene courses and know that an old lid can ruin a jar of new preserves quite easily!

Another job today was sorting out the strawberry runners  that were pegged down into pots to make new plants. All but two had rooted nicely so we have 27 new plants to fill up the second strawberry bed.
I spent 5 minutes deciding what we will eat for main meals next week and what jobs we are planning to do. After last week, which was all going in and out for various reasons, next week looks much quieter. Thank goodness.

Weather report today from the edge of Suffolk - Beautiful sunshine.