Self sufficient Saturday

I drank rather too much wine last night and then around 530am Candle tried to jump up onto the bed, missed and scratched my arm as she scrabbled about. I woke with a raging thirst so got up to get a drink and then couldn’t get back to sleep so when Tarly woke just after 6am I went down to her and tried to persuade her to come and sleep in our bed for a bit longer. I almost managed it but her and Ady got up about 645am when I finally did fall asleep again. Consequently we didn’t get out of the house as early as we’d planned but were still at the car boot sale before 10am with a picnic packed in the car.

We were looking for gardening tools – we already have a selection of small forks, trowels etc. and one shovel but need a couple of forks (or at least one), a rake, a couple of watering cans, maybe a wheelbarrow and various trug-like things. Not all right now but as you can often pick things like that up for a quid at a carboot sale it was worth looking before heading to B&Q for new ones. We had no luck and the only thing we bought was a bag of apples and a cob of sweetcorn for Davies who walked round eating it raw, while Scarlett and I munched our way through the apples.

We then had a frustrating trip to Tesco for petrol, a few things for dinner, Homebase for forks and finally B&Q for a fork all of which seemed to take forever. But we did arrive at the alllotment and sat down at the picnic table and bench at the edge of our plot to have our lunch, enjoy the sunshine and look out over Lancing and the sea 🙂

Then we got to work. Davies spent ages digging over his patch, methodically removing all the weeds and taking them down to the compost bin. He then planted up a few things, came up with various inventions and decorations for ‘Davies’ Magic Garden’ and was just utterly in his element. Thinking about it more an allotment is just soooo Davies; digging in the mud for treasure, filling your plot with random bits of junk cobbled together to make useful things, sitting and contemplating your ‘kingdom’ and visualising an end product that might be a long and distant dream. He was practically dragged away when the rest of us were ready for home and is already desperate to go back :).

Scarlett did well considering and probably stuck it out far happier than many 5 year olds would have done. She was concerned about germs for a while and not keen on getting her hands dirty but she coped well with it and really enjoyed gathering up the masses of potatoes we dug out of the ground

I think she will enjoy it even more when we have the pond dug in as she loves bug detecting and I have a few ideas to make the hands being dirty thing less of an issue for her (and indeed for me). She was less up for putting in the effort of clearing weeds etc. but she is more of an instant gratification type of girl :).

Ady and I did really well and cleared over half of the plot – I won’t repeat what I’ve already blogged over on self-suffish again but it was way more enjoyable than I’d anticipated and a very rewarding couple of hours work 🙂

It’s very sociable up there -not only did we chat to another allotment holder (the children more than Ady and I actually as they met up with him at the tap and chatted for ages) but we also exchanged ‘good afternoon’s with all the people walking past the other side of the fence walking their dogs up the downs.

We came home and dossed about for a while before the kids had a bath, dinner and bed (both asleep really quickly tonight), I cut up loads of clothes into rag strips in preparation for my next rug and Ady did some wombling about in the garage and mowed the lawn.

We used the onions we’d dug up in tonights dinner of chilli and we’re going to use the potatoes for tomorrow’s roast. I know they aren’t the fruits of our labours in planting them, but they were a nice reward for all that digging today :).