Choices offered this morning were bottling honey or feeding plants (with wee dilution for the roots and seaweed extract for the leaves). I went for the honey bottling 😉 Actually Ady was quite happy to be volunteered for the feeding anyway as he’d not done that last week.
Davies came with me and Scarlett went with Ady. I’d been feeling like they had not got all they could from this host so had asked them to work more with us this week. Last week they spent a lot of time playing or keeping an eye on the ducks. I have a blog post in my head about them generally actually so I will save it and do it seperately.
Davies mostly took photos 🙂
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I had to skim the settled bits off the top of a bucket of honey that has been kept gently warmed for the last week to try and liquify it more. These are bits of wax, propolis, the odd bee leg or wing and bits of comb – all edible and infact what we’ve been eating the whole time we’ve been here but are not jarred for paying customers. Next the bucket went into a large container with a tap and then I filled jars. 34 jars in all :). Put lids on jars and then stickers on jars. A very enjoyable if rather sticky job. The honey pouring into the jars was very hypnotic, a bit like watching a lava lamp and of course it smelled heavenly 🙂
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Meanwhile Ady and Scarlett did the feeding in the polytunnel and then picked some raspberries for sale. I finished off the honey bottling and then Ady and I moved on to picking currants – black, white and red and learnt about tayberries and loganberries which I had heard the names of but didn’t know what they were, so was most surprised to spot what looked like double length raspberries!
Late lunch after we had destalked all the berries and put them into containers in the freezer (we did get a bowl to bring back for breakfast tomorrow though :)) which only left us with about an hour and a half of our afternoon shift.
We thinned carrots in the polytunnel first. Lisa nets them to protect from carrot fly, only ever pulls them when it’s raining (which it was doing here this afternoon, we missed the heatwave everywhere else although it was still quite muggy and could have done with a proper thunderstorm to clear the air) and fills the holes back in when carrots are pulled. Between covering all bases she seems to not have any carrot fly problems. We did loads of thinning – must have been well over 100 carrots, with at least three times that number still in there to come out at later stages. Lisa and I pulled, Ady took them over to Davies and Scarlett and they cut the leaves off to stop them growing and taking moisture from the carrots. Davies then graded them into comedy shapes, small or stunted and the straight, long and suitable for sale creating several piles.
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Which just left us enough time to thin out the grape vines which are growing in the polytunnel. Davies and Scarlett went to make us a cup of tea while Ady and I wobbled on stepladders with secateurs cutting off bunches of grapes.
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Which took us to finishing time 🙂 Lisa had asked us if we’d cook tonight and Ady had been planning a satay veg stirfry but when Lisa mentioned a butternut squash and the carrrots we’d been pulling up I remembered the winning Delia recipe Chris had recommended when we cooked for the Not Swingers last year and how delicious that was so we made a variation on that instead.
We used squash, potatoes and carrots for the veg as that was what we had, onions we pulled up last week and brown rice. For me it was slightly lacking depth of flavour as they didn’t have any cayenne or nutmeg for the cheese sauce and their organic stock was a bit tasteless so the rice didn’t have the richness I remembered from last time. I slightly fretted about the cheese sauce too as we used soya spread rather than butter, wholemeal flour rather than plain so it took a bit of whisking to blend but it all came together.
In the end it was a hit – Carena had seconds and Lisa had thirds – I reckon if I’d have cooked more it would have gone too! We washed up (we do after every lunch and dinner, TBH I thought it was a bit of a cheek to be washing up after having cooked really!) and then headed back to the static.
On the plus side we have Friday off 🙂 Lisa is going to an allotment meeting and will be out all day so said as it was our last day anyway (we’re leaving here on Saturday) we could take the day off – so hurrah!
Back at the static I read the kids a couple of chapters of story before they headed off to bed. Ady has now folllowed them and I am toying with another blogpost or getting an earlier night myself…
I do love the way you still manage to do cleavage and nail polish. 🙂
Comment by Joyce — 28 June 2011 @ 9:53 am