First I want to thank you for all the gorgeous comments on my last post. I appreciate every one of them. I didn't actually intend to post, or even to be sitting at the computer. At 5.30am this morning when Adam left to go gym training with a buddy, I looked up and a huntsman spider the size of my head was strutting down my bedroom wall towards me. I was suddenly very wide awake. And so I found myself at the computer, wide awake, and there we have it. 

I'd forgotten how much I love this little space. And how much I appreciate you. So thanks. I appreciate it more than you know. 

I think sometimes I learn things the long way round. 

Take this year's garlic. 

It was looking so ready in the garden, I was watching the weather like a hawk, they predicted rain and so at 7.30pm one night last week, as the weather closed in, I pulled out the lot. I'd pulled a few for cooking over the previous month, I knew the cloves were fully formed and the advice was not to let them get wet in the ground for fear of rot. 

I bound them all up and tied them up to dry in our feed shed. Thinking I'd come back and clean them in the morning. It was last week. I didn't get back to them.

So now I have a year's supply of muddy garlic hanging in the shed. 

 

Note to self for next year: clean it before you hang it to cure. MUCH easier. (Cleans up OK really.)

 

 

And oh sourdough. I will not give up on you. 

Even when you repeatedly let me down the way a yeasted loaf never lets me down. 

I feed the mother starter. 

I persist in kneading loaves that just never get that bouncy silky feeling. And the kids turn up their noses at sourdough sarnies (although everyone likes sourdough toast.)

These loaves, proved over 24 hours, both weighed a tonne. Or so.

Am obviously a slow, slow learner.

 

Will you just look at those wee little Barred Plymouth Rocks? All that egg-turning in the incubator was so worth it. 

But wait, who is that interloper?

Yes I see you there, little black chicken! I'm sure he's this one, the first hatched, a Buena Vista bird, not one of the fertilised-eggs-delivered-by-post birds. He's bound to be a rooster and I'm bound to have to make some kind of call about his future which will be, frankly, contested. He's a funny misfitting little black bird and I think he's awesome. Bound to be trouble.

 

Oh yes hello pig, wipe your nose on my clean jeans huh? Legs all better, that's great. You bound away over there then. Do not name the pig. Do not name the pig. Do not name the pig.

 

Adam's bees are looking fantastic, from a distance. I admit to not having much to do with them. Dad's the expert, and opened the hives with Ad the other day and confirmed they're just about ready for a new super on each (another box on top.) One day we'll have honey. That's so super exciting. Man I love honey.

 

 

Not to self: don't leave eggs stacked at the front door for delivery. It's not like you don't do this every day. You will inevitably be carrying something: a child, a mobile phone that you're reading, another crate of eggs, and you will fall over the crate you left at the door. Every day. 

 

See that tiny baby of mine? Where'd she go? Do we really forget, every time, that this year, the two to three, is by turns the hardest and most wonderful? That overnight they get older, and more articulate, and independent and adventurous? See that scar on her forehead? That's my tiny baby running headlong into a brick wall at daycare while playing with her bestie. Learning the hard way. That's my girl.

xxx