Flower show entry and a giant tomato

Many thanks to everyone who kept fingers crossed for Him Outside.News from Papworth is sort-of OK. He had a heart-stopping moment - literally - when they did the worst bit of the collapsed artery so although he will be home tomorrow he will have to go back again in a few weeks time with resting in between. Looks like I will still be busy!
I suddenly realised that the local village flower and produce show is on Saturday and as I had already made the jam and craft things I really wanted to enter them.

 Today was the last date for entries so I did a dash down to the village with my form. I decided not to do masses of cake cooking entries - not a lot of time for baking - so I'll just do Suffolk Rusks, Fruit Scones and Cheese Scones, with just a few things from the garden and the craft things. A total of  15 classes entered.

The poetry entry was a short poem about a village.
This is what I came up with

A Village

A chapel, a Pub and a Church

A lady who'll cut your hair

A School for village children

With a shop and a Post Office there

This is the perfect village

Once found both near and far

 Then along came modern life

When everyone has a car

But it is people who make a village

Who stop to laugh and chat

And the village flower and produce show

Is the ideal place for that.

My final photo today is the first of the giant Andine Tomatoes, pictured beside a £2 coin so you can see it's size. It weighed just over 13oz. They are a pain to get germinated, difficult to grow and always look as if they about to keel over. But the taste!! With virtually no seeds and a very thin skin they are just delicious.

Yes, honestly, that is a tomato! I had half for my lunch and the other half for my dinner. YUM
I really WILL get around to answering comments especially to potential campsite visitors as soon as I have a bit more time. I also need to do a review of the month for July too. Just need more hours in the day.
 Thank you everyone for your bloggy support.

Just a quick note

Just a short note for family, friends and blogging friends. Him Outside is now Him In Papworth Hospital. He may be home Friday if it is just simple or it may be more complicated than first thought in which case he might have to stay a bit longer.
We have had some good rain here last night and today. First decent rain for 6 weeks so a bit less watering to do tonight. Temps of 30 degrees tomorrow so it will soon be dry again!
Thanks for comments, will get to reply ASAP.

Change of plan - might have known.

Well Him Outside is still Him Stuck In Ipswich Hospital! He should go to Papworth tomorrow and should still be home Friday.( Big feature on Papworth on Look East - our local BBC TV. They have perfected an operation which removes blood clots from lungs. Previously usually fatal- clever stuff).
The grass on the campsite didn't get cut by our neighbours gardener because we had showers of rain from about 9.30 onwards. I dug into a patch of soil to see how far it's penetrated and it hasn't! Not enough to do any good again.
The motorhomes have decided to stay for another night and I came home from shopping to find 2 messages on the phone for people wanting to come this weekend, another person phoned and then I found an email too. We already had one booking in the diary, so that's the 5 caravans/motorhomes we are allowed - very good news for the income column.
I am often amused when people congratulate themselves on having two consecutive No-Spend days. I realised that including todays trip for milk and cheese I have only been to any sort of shop 6 times this month. That means 25 No Spend days!
Once again many thanks for comments left on the blog and I'm sorry once again for not replying to everyone. You are all Lovely People! I've also not had a chance to put any comments on anyones blogs for a day or two either. Hopefully I'll have more time soon.

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.

Good grief - Sunday already and another small Sunday soapbox that's bound to offend!

Firstly thank you to everyone for comments and good wishes yesterday and once again apologies for not replying to each one of you individually.
 I've taken your advice and when I took her eggs around I asked our  neighbour A if I could borrow her gardener on her ride on mower to do a quick dash around the campsite grass on Tuesday morning. So that job will be done.
I should have kept my big mouth shut (or my fingers off the keyboard!) last evening about the lovely rain. We had hardly any! GRRRRRRR. So today I had to connect up the hose and fill up all the water butts off the metered supply again so as to keep all the tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers alive in the polytunnels.
What we did have was a very blustery night which woke me several times and today there has been a nice breeze but it is still too darn hot. I used to love hot weather so I think I must be getting old  as I've begun to moan about it.
I got the kitchen windows cleaned today which is something I've been wanting to do for a fortnight, then I put some more raspberries and some redcurrants into the freezer and did the ironing. I texted Him Outside to give him my regular update of what is happening here ( THANK HEAVENS for mobile phones and text messages) and he said I could have the rest of the day off! Very Funny- not.
I listened to the food programme at 12.30 on Radio 4 which was all about below the poverty line food blogs by  various people including Jack Munro ( agirlcalledjack) who is now doing a book of very frugal recipes. It was reading her blog several weeks ago that made me question my right to call this a frugal blog. But I decided to carry on as we ARE frugal but thankfully have never been below the poverty line. One of the things we avoid buying and then having to maintain or replace are gadgets. I have managed in the kitchen all my life with 'only' a food mixer and without all the other must-have gadgets that seem to fill the worktops in most peoples homes. And I definitely DON'T have a juicer. If God had wanted us to turn all our lovely variety of food into a liquid mess then he wouldn't have given us teeth! Apologies as that is bound to offend someone somewhere!

It's raining it's pouring!

Saturday evening and just back from visiting Him Outside who is still stuck in Ipswich Hospital waiting to be transferred. ( I didn't drive, but got a lift with our youngest and her other half).
 But the real news is that we have rain, lovely refreshing rain, rain running off the roofs and filling the water butts, rain watering all the runner beans that I haven't been able to do often, lovely rain making the courgettes grow bigger, rain that we have been waiting for for weeks and weeks. Never thought I would be so glad to see some rain.
We had fog rolling in off the sea this morning which made the garden cool enough for me to get the small mower out to do a bit of grass/weed cutting. The campsite will need doing soon, Him Outside tried to give me instructions for the ride on mower. I used to do the campsite years ago with a ride on but haven't used this new one, sounds complicated. I will let you know how I get on or I might just borrow our neighbours gardener and mower when he is over the road on Tuesday.

So many thank yous to say.

Thank you to everyone who left lovely good wishes and encouragement yesterday. Apologies for not replying individually. Him Outside read the blog via our daughters phone when they went to visit in the evening and he says A BIG THANK YOU too. I've only been blogging for  3 months and you      " don't know me from Adam" but it is a really a nice support to know that people are wishing us well.
I'm glad he is in hospital as he has had pains a few times while being there and if he was here he would be worrying that he wasn't able to help me. I'm fine here on my own and can manage most things that need doing, at least with this weather I don't need to worry about running out of wood for the woodburner as wielding a chainsaw is something I can't do! It has always been me left at home to look after stuff as I was the goat milker so needed to stay and to do that everyday.
This morning two ladies nearly came to blows over the raspberries that I had just put out for sale. I was unloading them from a tray onto the stall when a lady from up the road stopped and said she might take all 7 punnets. Another car pulled up behind and the lady in that car said she had been past 2 minutes earlier to see if we had raspberries out, seen me walking from the house, turned round in the next gateway and came back to buy some. Meanwhile lady 1 was merrily loading all 7 punnets into her car and lady 2 was a bit put out that she wasn't going to get even 1 punnet. There was nothing I could do except apologise and say there were no more to go out for sale today. Lady 2 went off in a huff! Lady 1 didn't even seem to notice! I think I would have felt guilty for taking the whole lot.
STILL no rain so I had to fill up all the water butts with a hosepipe this morning using metered water - THAT HURT! We have 2 separate water supplies, the one to the farm buildings and campsite is metered but our house is still based on the old ratings value from when we moved in 21 years ago. Unfortunately there is no way to connect a hose to any house taps and I feel that that would be cheating anyway. You know about the watched pot that never boils, well a filling water butt never fills until you do something else for 5 minutes and then it overflows! It certainly makes you think about water supplies for crops in dry countries when you have to spend a lot of time moving and carrying cans of water - it's heavy stuff. One of the charities I support is Water Aid, they do brilliant work in many countries. Luckily in the UK there  might get be rain here tomorrow, I hope there is. If the big tanks by the sheds get filled by rain they will flow automatically into the small tanks by the polytunnels which will save me a lot of work.
Thank you all once again for your thoughts and prayers. I just hope he gets to Papworth soon. Luckily he will go by hospital transport and it should only be an overnight stay there so I will  not need  to go.  I shall just

Time to do the egg collecting.
Back tomorrow.