Just A Great Day To Be Alive.

A great big sunny hi there and hello from SUPER sunny mid-Wales. What a day?! As I walked from having collected the eggs today I looked around the garden and thought just how lucky we are to be where we are and to be doing what we want to do.

Getting a post done whilst Jon is taking Harry to Sea Cadets, Alfie already at Youth Club. A catch up before the weekend. We currently have guests in the Airbnb room for two nights then we have Jon's mum and brother visiting on Sunday. Of course in the middle of this we have the usual activities like stage school and piano lesson; at least Chinese takeaway will take care of tea on Sunday!

Later on, when the guests who will be in our Airbnb room for the weekend said it must be like living your dream, I replied that it is. I also said we count our lucky stars everyday for what we do and and where we are when there are so many unfortunate happenings in the world right now. I'm going to say something a bit controversial; we are happy to be in our little bubble.

So today. I got a garden prep job done I have wanted to do for a while. At the front of the house behind the walls on each side of the door there were lots of weeds, roots etc which needed to come out before we it can be mulched with wood chippings.

Here is the before photo....

I am so chuffed with myself as it didn't take as long as I thought it would; the other side may get done tomorrow or Sunday morning.

I did a couple of other jobs; made a note of some seeds I want to sow, filled up my water bottles for the Poly House from the water butt and put some stones into the garden wall that had been dug up from various places.

Oh, the pizza oven is done!

We are hoping to use it tomorrow. Eeeek!

In the corner near the new veg patch I have dug over and hoed the little slope and scattered some mixed wildflower seeds; I look forward to those coming up, if they take it will make a lovely bright addition to that area.

Now, I might have been a bit previous but these are my early heritage variety Golden Acre cabbages. They have been out a couple of days, protected one night with fleece but all seems ok. They are fit for harvest from June to August.

In the Poly House my mixed salad leaves are really doing well.

The beetroot is looking strong so the three trays will be put out soon.

The spring onions inside are starting to look a little stronger; not sure if I need to put them outside yet but I'll wait until they get a bit bigger before I decide.

Oh, yesterday I got a couple of bargains from Morrisons; one Bramley apple tree and one Braeburn each for £5.

They are now in the fruit patch, thanks to Jon; he is also fetching from Morrisons this evening 6 bags of compost for me; 420 litres for £18.00; I think that's a good price.

Right well that is about it I think.

I do hope you all get some fantastic weather, get out in the garden, greenhouse or poly tunnel and I look forward to seeing what everybody gets up to over the weekend.

Bye for now.

Lou.x

Weekend Wonders.

What a weekend! 

Friday afternoon - weekend starts there here! - I finally, I keep saying it I know but I think I mean it this time, finished that flippin' flower bed I was weeding/digging.The weather was wonderful and I thought I had to get outside. I thinned things out and put aside some daffodil bulbs to take to my sister at the end of the month. I have just too many and even found a tonne of bulbs buried in a corner that hadn't even grown, they were just lying in the soil not that far down. 

After Jon came home from work we all went food shopping and then took Jake for a walk on the beach whilst we waited for our Chinese takeaway we'd ordered. It is a treat every six weeks or so and when we do have one it makes sense for it to be on the day we do the food shopping as it means the boys don't have to wait for tea too long when we get home.

On Saturday morning after breakfast we went into Aber to buy laying pellets and corn for the chickens, get fuel and a few things we didn't get last night; we need to find some suitable receptacles to put the chicken food in now. 

When we got home the boys checked for eggs; we already collected four in the morning, one of which was mahoosive as you can see! 

 and there was one more - our best day yet with a total yield of five then we had some lunch and headed out to the garden. l did the final dig over of the veg patch and Jon helped me take up the root of a bush or something right in the middle. I think I will make a sign to stick on that spot of the patch as we won't be able to plant anything in a circle about a foot across, but we can work round that.

Jon was busy digging a space for the strawberry patch. We LOVE strawberries in our house and it was Jon's only stipulation that we had a sizeable area to grow them. Therefore we used the last four of the railway sleepers from the far right corner of the garden to make wonderful space. We put a membrane down, that Jon suddenly remembered he had in the shed, and filled it with compost.

We decided to head to Sky's Garden Nursery, which opened a few weeks ago not far from us, and we bought eight traditional red strawberry plants and two called Pineberry that are white and apparently taste like pineapple.

I feel a little bit of a fraud as I was trying to keep to the grow your own thing but if we were going to have enough of them for the summer this was the only way. The owner of the nursery was very helpful and is popping round one Monday to get one of the bamboo bush root balls once we have dug them up; I plan on snidely getting as much free help and advice out of him as I can whilst he is here! 

On the way home from Sky's we stopped off at the river Ystwyth near to where Jon works at the saw mill and just ten minutes from the house. 

We call it Skimmer Island as the boys love to skim stones down there and they had put on their shorts and flip flops being determined to get in the water, as was Jake! 

I stood on the sidelines taking pictures whilst enjoying watching them having a wonderful time and declaring they would spend all the summer holiday there and who needed to go abroad - that's my boys! 

(We put the strawbs in the greenhouse when we got home and gave them a good watering as we didn't have time to plant them.)


This morning was my turn to let out and feed the ladies. We've been really busy over the weekend but still had a lot to do. I got a pot of tea on and the yeast sitting for some bread and fed the boys. Jon had already eaten and was outside pruning trees and cutting back unwanted, over grown ivy etc in the corner near the veg patch where the apple tree is; the blossom is looking fantastic. 

We plan on getting a few more fruit trees when the ground it clear; I KNOW it will be soon.

When the kids had eaten they set off with Jon for near to Aber for straw bails for the chicken bedding and a small amount of top soil for the strawberries. The plan to get top soil from Lampeter was shelved when it transpired that the man getting rid of it did not have a digger and Jon would have had to put it on the trailer by hand!

I finally had my breakfast at 10am and put the bread to prove again. The weather had started off rainy and a bit miz but soon improved and it quickly turned into another wonderful day. I scrubbed the kitchen table whilst waiting for the bread then went to iron during the last prove - I still had the boys' things to get ready for school!

I cleaned out the chickens and managed to start clearing some of the cut and pruned branches before Jon and the boys came home then we had lunch and set to again. This is where the bedding has ended up for now.

I planted the strawberries

and Jon was sorting out containers for the chicken food and doing some shed tidying whilst the boys added more branches to the fire pile. Because it was so hot, 25 degrees, there was only one thing for it; we headed off to Skimmer Island, again, and I'm sorry I didn't take my phone as the boys were swimming but no photos. Watching them in the water we know this was one of the things we signed up for when we moved here, a wonderful pace of life. I can see sunny days being down there with the dog and a picnic and having to drag them home! When home we were all a bit goosed so me and Jon are enjoying a beer whilst the boys veg out on the sofa.

As Jon and I were looking out from the top kitchen window on the chickens, my washing blowing in the wind, all be it around Jon's trailer, and the greenhouse we thank our lucky stars we are where we are.

Lou.x