We plough the fields and scatter…

A relaxed start to the day with Davies playing with some blocks while Scarlett put all sorts of clips and bows in my hair and we all watched cbbc together. Then we had a last minute rush to get out of the house on time to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie at the PYO farm. I wrote down a thank you note for Davies to copy while I hung some washing out and Scarlett tidied up. We were late but so were they and we pulled into the carpark right behind them.

The PYO farm we use is a pretty big one, open right through from June to October with a massive variety of fruit and vegetables available through the seasons. The weather has been pretty cold with showers of rain today so we pretty much had the place to ourselves and the tractor ran just for us, which delighted the children 🙂

We picked apples, sweetcorn and Julie got a big bag of butternut squash which the kids helped to pick. We also found a marrow that had already been picked. I was slightly fretful that Davies may decide to get all emotionally attached to one of them but he seemed perfectly capable of seeing them as just vegetables today after last night’s sweet potato debacle, so that was a relief.

Further tractor riding and then we went on to the local gardens which is just down the road and we’ve not been to for ages but is always good for the children to run around and use up some energy. By now the weather was really not very nice, but Highdown is fairly sheltered which made it even more ideal.

There were some children’s trail sheets which presumably was a school summer holidays activity and led you round the gardens spotting letetrs A-J with information about the places the letters were hidden along with little mini-quests too. When we arrived I went off to use the loos there and Davies tutted and said ‘you always need the loo when we come here’, to which I replied ‘yes, I just have this Pavlovian reflex to the place in my bladder!’ which of course then needed full explanation about dogs, saliva, bells and hunger, all infront of a very interested gaggle of elderly people walking up an appetite before having lunch in the tea rooms there – education everywhere! 😆

So we trekked round finding the alphabet clues and spotting things like lily pads, dragonflies, water snails, the tree planted by Queen Mary and bamboo – D and S delighted to both spot the bamboo and tell us all that pandas eat bamboo before we’d even identified it as bamboo eaten by pandas on the sheets :). We ended up in an area with some huge trees that the children can go inside the shade of as a ‘camp’ with conveniently located benches for grown ups so we sat there awhile chatting while the children played and then Scarlett took a tumble and hurt her leg, the rest of us were getting hungry and the rain was setting in so we decided it was home time.

We came home for crumpets for lunch, I drank about four cups of tea and the children played together all afternoon. Scarlett and I made some flapjacks and then they had an early tea of sausage and mash followed by lots of flapjacks :). It all feels very much like the summer was a long time ago here, which I am quite happy about as I love Autumn and being out and about walking today made me look forward to our walks in the woods and wet and windy seaside walks to come. Way back last year I liked the idea of some sort of nature volunteering as a family and I’ve been looking into that again. It seems that it is mostly for secondary school age children upwards that bigger organisations are looking for volunteers but I’m sure we can find somewhere where we can get involved in some sort of outside in nature type stuff.