REMINISCING

On Saturday hubby decided to tidy and clear out the loft. He shouted down that there were black dustbin bags full of clothes that the boys had grown out of and I had packed away, and wasn't it about time we did something with them.

I have sent about a dozen sacks to the charity shop, where hopefully someone will get use out of them. But I came across a carefully packed bag of hand knitted matinee jackets, capes, bottees and hats that my grandmother had made for J 19 years ago. As they are so beautiful and my grandmother died many years ago, I couldn't bare to part with them. Hopefully one day one of the boys might be able to use them for their children.



It got me reminiscing, and I thought about how things have changed and but how they are now turning around again.

When I was a child, in the 60's/70's it was quite normal to;

• Grow your own veg in the garden, and to be sent out by parents/grand parents to pick beans or peas or pull carrots for dinner - it was just something you did.
• Wear clothes that had been handed down by older siblings, cousins, friends or parents -why buy new clothes when there were perfectly good ones that could be reused.
• Your mother to darn / mend holes in clothes to get more use out of them - see above
• Walk or use public transport to go places - mothers either couldn't drive or the family only had one car
• Have homemade meals, and cakes - who else was going to make them!?

Now it is becoming common again to;

• Grow your own veg - people want to know what goes onto their food and that it hasn't been mutated in any way. Food is getting so expensive that more people are growing out of necessity, and it is a great way to get exercise with many of us sitting behind desks or working inside all day.
• Re-using clothes is now called - recycling or vintage and is very acceptable, can you imagine it in the 80's!
• Mending clothes gives them character, and originality so very in at the moment.
• People are returning to walking or public transport - this time due to the cost of fuel and trying to go greener or get fitter.
• There is an ever increasing return to homemade food - again we want to know what goes into our food and we are now realising it works out cheaper. With the numerous cooking shows on TV we have plenty of ideas for wonderful meals that can be cooked in minutes.
• Many of us are enjoying the revival of home crafts; knitting, crochet, sewing, cooking, but less that 40 years ago this was just a way of life.

We worry about what is happening at the moment, but everything goes in cycles things get worse and then they get better. We make everything, then we buy then we return to making again - we just give it different names and have different reasons, but we do it all the same. So in the end there is not point in worrying at all.

We may even find that the seasons get back to how they were, I can remember being told in my geography classes that we were heading for a mini ice-age!

But right now my clematis had come out in bud again and it's nearly October.

I'm off back to my cave now to cook a dinosaur egg omelette!

SO SAD - ONE OF MY HENS IS MISSING

One of my black hens, you can just see her behind the white cockerill, has disappeared. When I counted the number in their tree last night before locking their gate I was one short, so walked around underneath - very risky without an umbrella, to see which one and found that it was Sooty.

After searching the garden and the neighbouring fields I still couldn't find her, but neither did I see any feathers left behind. I don't think she can have been taken by a fox, so it must either have been a bird of prey, we have several in nearby woods, or unfortunately a two legged visitor, there have been a number of chicken thefts in the county recently. Sooty is now the 4th chicken that has 'disappeared' in the last few months and as you can imagine I am quite sad, they are my pets, very generous ones who provide lovely eggs, so it is a bit like losing your pet rabbit.

At least the weather should be good this weekend, so that will be a bit cheery, especially as T will be playing his first club game of the new rugby season on Sunday, so I can spend a couple of completely guilt free hours enjoying the sun.....woops I mean supporting my son.

Have a good weekend

p.s. sorry there are no breaks between paragraphs, they are showing up in the preview pane but are disappearing when I publish!

Mrs Tiggywinkle returns

This isn't the actual Hedgy

Last night I was a bit late locking up the chicken run and went out in the dark. As I got closer I could hear rustling and crunching in the pen, and was worried that a fox may have crept in and hidden under their house, waiting for a nice breakfast when my ladies and gents flew down in the morning. (for those new to my blog, my chickens like to roost in a tree, shown in previous pics)

Out of a pile of leaves in the corner of the run suddenly appeared the most enormous hedgehog, who I imagine had been feasting on the numerous slugs that seem to appear at night - Where do they go during the day, is there a secret slug commune somewhere that I don't know about?! Relieved I locked the gate and was walking back to the house, when I saw two smaller hedgehogs scuttling across the garden in the direction of the run - obviously worried that Mother hedgy would give them a flea in their ear for being late.

I don't know about you but seeing hedgehogs really makes me feel like Autumn is on it's way.

SUMMER SUN AT LAST

It certainly was a wonderful weekend weather wise, Saturday and Sunday were glorious and I spent most of them outside making the most of it. The picture above is of my marvel-of-peru (mirabilis jalapa) which was just starting to open in the afternoon sun. It is one of my favourite plants, mainly because it opens late afternoon so you have the blooms to look at in the evening, and flowers quite late in the summer - or at least it does where I live, so out lives many other plants, and long after the flowers have died the leaves live on so you still have some nice greenery.


The plants are just starting to make their seeds now, and I have collected quite a few, so if anyone would like some please send me an e-mail - (uk only I'm afraid as I don't know the procedures for sending seeds through customs).


I am not a great expert on gardening, but I believe that the seeds and parts of the plant are poisonous so perhaps not suitable for gardens with small children. They also seem to be very drought and flood resistance and like the full sun. The plant is very generous and will give you extra plants every year if you don't deadhead before the seeds appear. I started off with 10 seeds 3 years ago and have left the plants to do what they will in a bare corner, they have now filled a 2m x 3m patch, with their heights ranging from about 6 ins for the first year plants to 4ft for the 3 year old plants.

The hens also enjoyed the weekend sun, and I caught a group of them dozing by our fish pond, happily sun bathing. They like to drink out of the pond, even though they have water left out for them, I'm not sure what the fish think of this though :)

Autumn must be coming as the hens are putting themselves to bed whilst it is still light. In the summer they are still scratching around the garden at 1o o'clock. I'm not sure what the significance of the season makes to their bedtime but it must be something. You can see Lily using their house as a platform to fly into the tree.

CONFUSED FUSHIA

This morning I noticed one of my fushia plants has broken out in bud again. Since the other plants have all but lost all their flowers this cheered me up no end, I just hope that some of my other plants decide to follow suit.

The chickens and ducks were enjoying the glorious morning that we had today, with the chickens escaping into the garden before I had chance to open their gate. Harry Houdini had nothing on them, they use their house to jump upto the tree where they roost in the branches (the house is a bit rustic, and i love the colours, but they only use it for laying and to sleep in if it is really windy). If I dare to be late letting them out in the morning i.e. after dawn! they simply fly over the top the fence and let themselves out.

Bertie, Bassett and Jemima, our very timid trio of ducks. They are quite happy running around their pen, and swimming in their little pond, they occassionally even have a visit from one of the chickens who fly over their fence to 'share' their food. We tried taking down their fence to let them share the garden with the hens, but they didn't like that idea at all and wouldn't come out of their house until we put it back up again :(

Camera shy - these hens all turned their backs at the moment I took the photo, obviously they hadn't done their makeup. Phes (so called because she looked like a pheasant chick when she hatched) the tan hen on the bench went so far as hiding her head under her wing, she must have been having a bad hair day as well!

This bench was a favourite spot for me to sit and read in the summer, but it seems to have been taken over by hens. The last time I used it, I had a hen on the back looking over my shoulder - don't you just hate that? - and two others staring at me from next to me on the seat as if to say "what do you think you are doing!"

The lovely red crested cockerill is Jasper, he is beautiful, if a little stupid - when we moved the gate on his run it took him nearly a week to find it on his own, just standing outside crowing until we went out to show him the way in.


Have a lovely weekend all.

IN THE DOG HOUSE

Well he's finally finished. For the past week T, number 2 son , has been sawing and hammering every evening in the garden. He has been making a 'hen house', very nice but our hens have a house and then only use it to lay in as they prefer to sleep in the tree above it! Still it was keeping him amused and he was making a good job of it.

Tonight he asked me to have a look at his finished house, on inspection I found that it has a large archway cut out in the front. He isn't making a fowl house for an ostrich, as the door made it look like, but has decided that he is changing it to a kennel. There is only one problem with this......we don't have a dog!

IT'S ARRIVED

For our anniversary, back in May, hubby gave me the money to buy a Wii Fit, which I'd had my eye on for a while, having moaned for the past year that I was still carrying the baby fat from our first born and it was about time I did something about it.....the thing is our first born is now a 6ft+ nineteen year old! Oh dear definitely time to act.

You'd think that it would be easy to go to any store, either physically or on line and purchase said game - particularly as it was being advertised daily on TV, why do they do that, isn't it illegal to torment people with things they can't have? :( Well no, it seems that the whole world wanted the game and no-one seemed to have one, or rather no-one that wanted to sell for a realistic price, if you wanted to pay £200 for a £70 game on ebay there were plenty to be had.

I eventually found a site that looked for games for you and e-mailed you when anywhere had one in, though usually by the time I had got onto the net any available had sold out,more toment. On Friday though I struck lucky, I logged in 5 mins after receiving an e-mail and was finally able to secure a game. No excuses now to starting that fitness programme that I had been promising myself since the start of the year, and had so far made numerous excuses why I hadn't started yet.

Wii Fit duly arrived today, 4 months after I first started trying to buy the game, only trouble is the console is in my 13 year olds bedroom and so far I haven't had a look in, he has been telling me how great it is, but as for moving over to let Mum have a go..no chance! I just hope that now I have got this close I don't have to wait another 4 months until I can finally try it out, I will have run out of exercise excuses by then and I certainly don't want to have to start running round the block. Looks like that baby fat may make 20.

The Mystery of the Missing Eggs

I have wondered lately why my hens seem to be laying fewer eggs than usual. It all started with the beginning of the wet weather, I know that they tend to stop laying in the very cold weather, but this was particularly early and I couldn't work out why. Then yesterday the mystery was solved. I was out in the garden putting out my washing, there was a strange yellow thing in the sky, that hadn't been seen around these parts for many weeks, and I wanted to take full advantage of it as I didn't know when I might see it again. Well all of sudden there was a commosion coming from our duck pen, 3 ducklings with a little house to themselves, their own little pond under a large walnut tree for shade and a large patch of grass for them to waddle around and with a low fence around.

One of the ducklings had managed to get out and into the lane and was running up and down behind the hedge trying to get back in, while the two other ducks were running up and down inside the hedge wondering where their pal was. After a little persuasion Bassett, the absconder, got back inside her run and promptly ran into her house where she stayed for the rest of the day, occassionally putting her head out of the door to see what was going on - I don't think she enjoyed her escape too much and won't be venturing beyond her run again.

Getting back to the missing eggs, my hens are free range, and during the day are free to wonder around the garden, they also regularly venture across the lane to my Brother and Sister-in-law's field next door to visit their hens, whilst I was rescuing Bassett, I noticed one of my hens appearing from next doors hen house, where it transpires my hens have been laying if they get caught out in a storm of rain, daily lately, and didn't want to get wet walking home to their own house, and people think that hens are daft.

I had a long list of things I hoped to achieve this weekend, and am pleased to say that I have managed most of them, I have drawn up the designs for this years Christmas cards. I think fabric cut out in the shape of hearts, christmas trees and some red felt in the shape of a letter box with a some snow and a little robin painted on will be the main ones, if I can work out how to upload pictures I might put some pictures in my blog when they are made.

I have also made my list of presents to make this year, with ear-rings and necklaces on the list for teenage family members, a variety of knitted scarves for friends, some embroidered hand warmers for other out doorsy friends, and I'm also going to pot up some indoor forced hyacinths in some china bowls found in a charity shop that should be out just in time for Christmas, I know this isn't strictly making the gift, but is within the same philosophy of not purchasing new, so I thinks still falls within my resolution. Whilst the foodies will be receiving home made chutneys and flavoured oils, and boosy mincemeat.

Where I am struggle is in thinking of gifts to make for the male members of the family who age from 3 to 70, so I would be very grateful if anyone has any suggestions.

Whilst pondering my christmas gifts I managed to finish 2 squares of my blanket, only another 100 to go.

Of course everything stoped while I watched Gloucester Rugby yesterday, where the boys beat local rivals Bath away at Bath for the first time since the game went professional. WELL DONE LADS!!!

First Day Chat

Hi and thanks for logging into my Blog.

Well i've finally gotten round to setting up my own blog after reading the wonderful blogs from Karon at Dream Acres http://www.dreamacres.co.uk and Jane at snapdragon http://www.snapdragongarden.co.uk. As you can probably tell I am very new to this, but hope that my blog is of interest, and if not Hayho I'm saving trees by not using paper in a diary.

I'm expecting a very busy weekend this week. I'm trying to catch up on a patchwork blanket i'm knitting, but of course will have to break off to watch Gloucester Rugby play against local rivals Bath on Saturday, come on boys you need to do better than last week! I am hoping to get my designs together for my Christmas cards this year, and it's about time I put together my list of Christmas presents to make. AT the moment I have stuck to my years resolution to make all of my gifts this year - I've managed it for all of the birthdays, but Christmas will be the real test.

On Sunday I will be going with my husband to watch our 13 year old son start this seasons rugby training, and I very proud to say that I'm not just a fairweather mother, I watch him in whatever mother nature can through at us. As our 19 year old son is the assistant coach, it is quite a family outing.

I then need to do a stack of baking for the invisible lodger who seems to empty our cupboards at an alarming rate, but is never ever seen.......and of course "It's not me Mum", now where have you all heard that before!?

I've just looked out and there seems to be a break in the rain, so I'm off to shut up my ducks and hens whilst it's dry.

take Care

Kim