Holiday Charity Shops, Clothes for a Wedding and Book Reviews in one sentence

Thank you for all the comments about our vegetable garden, that's just part of our 5 acres. I must go round and take pictures of other parts of our smallholding. They have been on the blog before but probably a couple of years ago and there are lots more new readers since then.We got another bed of potatoes in yesterday but the job I really need to do is weeding the front flower garden if only the wind wasn't still too cold and strong to work out there. March has really been a very windy month from start to finish and today has been the windiest of all, no chance of apricots as the wind has taken the flower buds right off the trees. The first visitors to our campsite are due tomorrow and yesterday we swept out the loos. This morning they were full of dead leaves and dust again - blown in under the doors and the mats and dustbins have all taken off!

 While we were away on holiday we managed to visit a few charity shops, although we were so sad to find that the brilliant charity bookshop on the quay in Watchet didn't open for the season until a couple of days after we were home- How annoying is that !

These were my Somerset finds

Old mixing bowl and jug,  paperback book: - Derek Tangye - Sun on the lintel ( a book that the library no longer has in stock) and a cushion cover very similar to the one my daughter got me for Mothering Sunday. My total spend on these = £7. I also got a tee-shirt for £1.79 but that's gone in the wash and Col found a good quality lightweight jumper for £6 which seems a lot for a charity shop but then anything over a couple of quid seems a lot to me now! Hence the difficulty buying clothes and shoes for our eldest's wedding, which is why we went to the outlet shopping place.

I managed to find comfy smart wide Clarkes' shoes with small heels for £24.99 instead of £40.00       (shoes with heels do feel odd after wellies and crocs!) and Col (who moans loudly at the proper price of shoes and usually  buys cheap ones which then fall to bits or hurt) was persuaded to spend £50 instead of  the proper price of £75. His new suit came with 2 free shirts - handy. Men are lucky - he will be able to wear the same suit for all 3 weddings of our offspring but I will have to have new each time I guess. While at the Outlet village I also got a couple of cotton jumpers.They will replace my decent jumpers which means the decent ones can become working here ones and the two scratchy, cheap, old jumpers can go- Good! I've spent all winter searching charity shops with no luck so the bullet had to be bitten and new bought. Really goes against the grain but at least the new were not full price.

The books that I read while on holiday have been added to my  separate page ( click on Books Read 2015 on the blog header). Hens Dancing by Rafaella Barker is the fictional diary of a woman with two young children whose husband has gone off with his masseuse. Although it claims to be the modern version of Diary Of a Provincial Lady by E.M.Delafield it is much shorter and not as funny. Still a good light read. The Bean Tree by Barbara Kingsolver is about a girl getting away from her rural home in Kentucky, becoming the guardian of a baby she names Turtle and making a new life in Tucson. This is the  second of Barbara Kingsolver's fiction  books that I have read and enjoyed but I still prefer her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about her families year of eating local. The Trip to Jerusalem by Edward Marston is the third in his Elizabethan Theatre historical crime series, from my book collection .A Christmas Odyssey by Anne Perry is a Novella, again historical crime, which I grabbed off the mobile library shelves last month. A quick read by this prolific author.

I've copied all my recipes that are on the blog onto a separate page, also on a tab under the header photo, this will make them easier to find. I found an anonymous comment there asking about the Onion (Marmalade) Chutney and have answered it and added a bit I missed off when I copied it over from the Recipes under Labels.

Welcome to Andrea and Faith, new readers following on Bloglovin', and also to Joy, The BUTT'RY and BOOK'RY and Shirl who are all over there on the right in the Google pictures.

Back in a day or three
Sue