Thursday is Veg Box Day here each week – they run a veg box scheme for 40 local people selling small or large bags of fruit and veg and eggs. Everything has to be picked and packed the same day and delivered to four different drop off points – they leave here with the car loaded up at 330pm so it’s quite a tight schedule. It’s all very military precision and I am in awe of their set up here on that, although they are ten years in to their time here and have various uni degrees in such things as permaculture. They certainly know their stuff though, although they shared some hilarious stories about the early days which heartened me that they have not always been quite so switched on :).
So work involved picking various things – salad leaves, basil, garlic, chard. Davies and Scarlett came and helped during the morning and were set to work on courgettes and marrows. I was really proud of them actually; they did a great job of finding and harvesting stuff and talked to all the adults around them (Beth, Wilf, Jo, Frankie the other WWOOFer and Jan who comes to do veg box stuff) asking all sorts of interesting questions and making observations about things like different coloured flowers on borage plants and which the bees prefered and speculation as to whether the flowers changed colours at different points in their pollination process.
We had tea breaks (all four of us rather cautiously trying the mint tea on offer and being surprised at how much we liked it!) and lunch breaks all together chatting and laughing. There is a lot of love in this place, it’s very inspiring and lovely to be part of – we already feel like part of the family and today I was greeted with a big hug and kiss from Beth who is particularly tactile. Of all the places we have been this is definitely the one I feel most at home in and could totally see myself fitting in to. The others are less sure and it is not something we are even considering but it is a mark of how welcoming I find it here.
We’d started work early so finished early and got our veg bag and went for a proper explore of the land as Ady and I had not walked around much before although Davies and Scarlett have thoroughly explored the land. They have about 15 acres here including a section of river, some woodland, some open pasture, the areas of land with dwellings on, the land given oven to the chickens and the growing areas with polytunnels and raised beds. It is a very cool place for the kids with loads of camps, dens, treehouses, rope swings, places to scramble across the river and so on.
We tracked the kids down and walked back with them to the yurt then I got dinner going (pasta, made with a tomatoe, garlic, onion and basil sauce with grated cheese, mostly from the gardens). The kids went back out to play after dinner – they are getting on well with the boys here although I think Davies finds Pip the 9yo a bit needy and rather prefers Oaken the 10yo who has been at school this week. I rang my parents and the letting agent to find out whether the tenants want to stay for another 6 months and deal with some issues our neighbours have been having with the chickens and a pet ferret the tenants have got.
Today Ady and I have been on our own – Beth and Jo were out at a Home Ed / Steiner kinder group with the little boys, the older boys were at their grandparents, Matt was building and Wilf was doing admin, Frankie the other WWOOFer was busy on another task. So we spent the whole day in the gardens, completely clearing two raised beds of weeds and transplanting some stuff that had been mistakenly planted in one of them, watering in the polytunnel, digging the paths either side of the raised beds onto the beds (they do this every couple of years as the earth is like a sort of compost there by virtue of having all the weeds etc. left to rot down on the paths) and then spreading a couple of barrow loads of actual compost on the top. A very enjoyable day in the sunshine with the radio on and visits from the kids every now and then and Wilf coming up to join us for lunch.
Afterwards we went to the rope swing to watch Davies and Scarlett act out a scene from a film they had been practising using some daring rope swing stunts which had me cheering and Ady hiding his eyes 😆 We then both had a go on the swing too, it’s very exciting 🙂
Back at the yurt everyone else had gone out this evening – we had been invited too and even offered babysitting 🙂 but had declined and had a very delicious dinner of stir fry using herbs, greens, onions and garlic from our veg bag, spices, peanut butter, soy sauce and noodles and rice from our store cupboard. Davies and Scarlett added some spam from our own food stash too but Ady and I enjoyed the healthiness of it without!
We all had washes in the baby bath using boiled rainwater – it feels quite sufficient although I’m not sure I’ll be able to effectively wash my hair that way, I don’t think I can get the shampoo out properly. I read several chapters of story to the kids.
We’re looking forward to a weekend off, planning on walking into Durham tomorrow and hoping to see The Barts on Sunday 🙂