Wednesday – Ady went off to work again in the morning – racking up those last few shifts before the hostel shuts, just as well as we’ll be spending money next week so it’s good to feel it’s been earned before it’s been spent.
I woke the kids up, we all had croissants for breakfast and then we released the ducklings with the mama duck. They took quite a while to actually come out of the pen and infact she dashed out a couple of times on her own, to drink water, to eat food, to just delight in all that space and freedom! Before encouraging them to come out too. Davies and Scarlett took the pet ducklings down to the river for a swim and I chopped off the excess netting from the fruit cage roof to use in netting over the raised beds. I watched Scarlett and the ducklings for a while in the river.
All that done we came back up for a cup of tea and Ady arrived home. He had lunch – the rest of us were not hungry as we don’t usually eat breakfast so were still filled up with croissants. Then he and I went out to the walled garden and he fixed some beds and made hoops over them from various bits of pipe we had kicking around while I weeded them, cleared around the sides and fixed netting to them. We have 18 raised beds altogether (3 of them are super long), four are now properly sown and netted and cleared, so only 14 to go! Three of those already have things in them – some rhubarb and asparagus which are permanent crops but much neglected and in need of weeding and netting and the third is purple sprouting broccoli from last year which went over and turned mutant and got eaten by turkeys in the end – it appears to have self seeded so I will leave that to it’s own devices for this year too. Another of the large beds has four posts which mean it’s idea for tall netting so I am planning to transplant the seedlings of peas in there which I already have growing and ready to move. Lots to do, all nice stuff to get on with too.
While we were chatting and having a cup of tea in the sunshine Tom appeared coming to do his last bit of work for us and sign the WWOOFing book – he has finished the digging out and done about half of the drainage ditch too – probably only a couple of hours work remain in there of the ditch digging now. Once we have the mini polytunnel up and the walled garden sorted we will return focus to that and get it back on track. More volunteers arrive when we get back from the show next week.
All of the ducklings and the goslings were down in the river swimming with the packs – so lovely to see.
I supervised the kids making tortilla wraps, showed them how to peel and chop avocadoes, Davies demonstrated he is the king of grating cheese which is good. I hate it so much and have grated my knuckles so many times over the years that my single biggest kitchen indulgence these days is ready grated cheese which I buy in bulk! We watched the first couple of episodes of the new series of Eureka.
Thursday – not so productive as Sheerwater boat trip day. Another frustratingly quiet day 🙁 Barely even a bird let alone a cetacean. The one ‘highlight’ was going around the whole of Soay which we have done a few times before but this time going right into the harbour where Gavin Maxwell did the shark fishing and processing and seeing the building.
Our drainage pipe had arrived at the pier yesterday so we fixed it onto the roof of the Jeep, transferred it onto the back of the Rangerover, drove across the river and part way up the croft and then rolled it across the croft to the cob site. So glad that it is here. We went for a cup of tea before starting the next raised bed only to realise it was already 5pm and therefore too late to do anything else really. Scarlett, Ady and I went down to the shop for a few bits and stopped for a drink. Davies stayed home with Bonnie. I rang my parents and Ady cooked dinner – an eclectic mix of leftovers, stuff which needed using up and random added stuff – I think all four of us had slightly different variations on our plates.