Hello! Hello, JULY! Jeepers. Sometimes it feels like a rush from market to meeting to garden to kitchen and suddenly it's school pick up again. Really? It's really three o'clock already?
Some days there's a breakthrough or great big orders then there's a whole lot of baking baking baking, sometimes very late into the night, and a little happy dance, then some more baking.
It's all great round here, we're a little bit excited. Stuff's happening, we'll catch you up as we go, a bikkie while we chat?
We borrowed that big guy up above today. A beautiful-natured Wessex Saddleback boar belonging to friends and he's here for a holiday. Wink wink. Check out his smile!
See that house frame?! That's Mum and Dad's house going up over the back fence. It's super exciting for them, a brand new house designed totally to their specifications! And for us, every beam is another step towards our family of five moving out of our two-room loft and into the farmhouse! It's going up before our eyes! The builders watch all the activity around the place here. The boar arrived today on the trailer and Dad followed Adam up the paddock to help unload. The builders wondered about the boar and Dad suggested they might like to put some music on for him. Wink wink. If we feed the builders lots of bikkies do you reckon they'll build faster or slower?
There's been a change in our landscape in other ways here, one of the very old trees came down last week in a big storm. One day it was standing, the next the whole root ball had lifted out of the soaking wet ground and the tree was leaning against our loft and threatening to come through the ceiling. Everyone was a bit stressed.
Instead of calling the SES which I suggested doing, Dad called his mates the local tree-loppers who showed up in no time and managed to drop the tree with no damage to any buildings. It was super impressive. There was some tensioning of cables with the tractor and voila, the tree became fragrant woodchip for the fixed-yard chooks.
There was no other storm damage, my broadbeans copped it but we only lost a small number, and everything else seems OK.
Hey speaking of gardens, remember this? The man in the weeds, hoeing out the market garden?
Almost there. By hand. He's a legend.
Garlic's up. Just waiting for it to dry out a bit before a mate comes in with a cultivator over the rest of the paddock. We're ordering seeds. We're bugging our friends who've been doing this successfully for over ten years down at Old Mill Road with lots of dumb questions, but more on the fabulous Fraser and Kirsti shortly!
And underneath the tree that came down, there was this frame.
Dad put it up years ago, thinking he might put in a greenhouse. But it was really very shady under that huge old tree and he never did. I think it's now a perfect place for a greenhouse! On the list.
And meanwhile, our baby turned three. THREE! I hope she always finds herself nibbling bikkies in wheelbarrows, gorgeous wee thing. We all adore her.
When time's flying, there's nothing I'd rather do than sit down here for a minute and write to you about what's going on. It slows me down and reminds me to celebrate. Thank you for stopping by here. I predict this next six months is going to get even busier as we try new things and build a commerical kitchen (finally!) and start stuff we've been thinking about and talking about for years. We're going to hang on and let our legs fly out behind us if necessary, jump on too, this'll be fun!
xxx