Enhanced productivity

Feeling quite back-to-schooly here, I think it is all of the planning I’m doing for the becomming Wondering Wanderers and decluttering the house giving me a taste for being productive, which coupled with the closing in of evenings, and nip in the air is making some deeply hidden part of me yearn for new school shoes and pencil cases and subject dividers in ring binders.

Fortunately I’ve lived through enough Septembers of not going back to school, including the last five with very conscious not back to school-ing to feel fine about the fact I don’t even have a laminator any more – we sold it yesterday at the car boot sale for £3 including a pack of laminating pouches 😆

So I went with Productivity Otherwise (a bit like EO but without all the shady undertones and infighting). The rain has meant we have a back log of washing, which with a holiday coming up needs attacking, so I dealt with some of that and then we headed up to the poor neglected allotment. Our neighbouring plot holder was there so I was even more embarrassed at the state of our plot – we’re going to try and get up there one evening this week and clear our crops then give notice. We have loads of potatoes in there, an apple tree we were waiting to fruit before digging up and bringing home and a tiny bit of sweetcorn, plus any tools we want to bring home.

We dug up two and a half rows of potatoes, Davies and I dug while Tarly collected and we looked at all the differences between the different varieties and looked at the seed potatoes to see how the plants had grown. Our neighbour then called us over to dig up some of her pink fur potatoes (a bit like anya new pots, very nobbly bobbly and comedy shaped – the type of root veg regularly featured on That’s Life!) and gave us a load of those too.

We’d taken one of the OPAL hedge survey kits with us that had arrived last week to do and then realised there isn’t actually much of a hedge there so when we’d finished digging potatoes we dropped them off in the car and went for a walk into the woodland to find a hedge there. We chose one, chatting to some women collecting elderberries on the way – Scarlett told them we’d left plenty of flowers on those trees in the spring so there would be berries to collect 🙂 which had us talking about the difference between elderflowers and berries and what you can make with them.

Hedge survey completed – it involved measuring a 3m length of hedge, identifying the plants using the provided laminate spotter sheets (knew there would be something laminated in there somewhere today 😉 ), doing a wildlife sweep by shaking branches into a container and IDing them too, checking the ground for holes and measuring those and recording any findings on a survey sheet to submit to OPAL.

We came home via CoOp and then Asda (CoOp had no free range chicken) and had lunch. The kids went off to play Xbox and I set about using up some of the many eggs we had by making an orange meringue pie – egg yolks used in pastry and orange curd making, egg whites in the meringue, that brought the egg mountain down nicely :).

Ady came home and my productivity levels dipped as we spent an hour or so hanging out in the lounge all watching tv together. Then Davies got the geomags out and Scarlett asked if she could do some sewing. She started by repairing a hole in Big Dog her soft toy and then wanted to actually make something. She found some material and wanted to make a soft toy cat. So with very minimal guidance she drew a cardboard template which I cut out for her and then cut two pieces of material using it which she then sewed together. I showed her a couple of different stitches she could use and then left her to it which I went to get dinner cooking.

Ady went out to cut the hedges so in a spot of matchmaking I suggested to Davies he took the second hedge survey out and did it with Ady – we’d been talking earlier about how different the results would probably be in a hedge at home in the garden. They really enjoyed doing that and came in enthusing about all the different things they’d spotted.

Scarlett finished sewing her cat, stuffed it and sewed it up. I got her to draw a picture of how she wanted the face to look and she asked me to sew that on although she did sit with me and watch while I did it so could probably have a go herself next time. Her creativity is really flourishing at the moment and she’s gone from being reluctant to try new stuff and asking for help to wanting me to show her all sorts of things and going off and using the new skills to create :).

I served up dinner and at Scarlett’s request we kept the TV off and talked. Subject of choice began as ‘what do you want for Christmas / your birthday?’ and went round the table but quickly became about WWOOFing predictably. We were trying to think of useful and sensible presents for people living off the land in a van short on space but also trying to think what we would most miss about home and whether we could recreate those things.

Dinner was very nice and the orange meringue pie was delicious. I’d bought clotted cream to go with it, mindful of us not looking at any River Cottage Family cookbook stuff for a while and Davies and Scarlett didn’t remember having clotted cream ever before (they have!) which made it even more delicious.

We were all very full afterwards and had to slump on sofas. Davies and I played some of a DS game he’d been stuck on – Christmas Carol and Scarlett flitted about between us and Ady who was washing up. The kids went to bed and we had baths.

Tomorrow I start swimming the channel!