Brrr, it's been chilly this week. Still, things have been done, adventures have been had, and people have been seen. All good. On Wednesday, we met a friend at a local cafe, and bought tea and cake to have in her garden. It was lovely to see her, and I am so much enjoying the feeling of doing 'normal' things. We had to wrap up in blankets of course, but actually I'm finding one of the benefits of enforced outdoor socialising at the minute is being outdoors. We would definitely have been inside if the rules had allowed, and would have missed out on the crisp spring day, the neighbours walking past, and the birds singing (and the smell of muck spreading, but the less said about that, the better). I spent the rest of the day pottering about, some of it in the garden. Some of the beans have fallen prey to the frost this week, and I've now replaced the several layers of plastic with fleece in an attempt to stop the rest going the same way. Miraculously, a tomato seedling has appeared! I hope the rest quickly follow, and that they'll be cosy enough under their fleece blanket. I harvested the last of the leeks and kale from the garden, and made a start on processing them. Yesterday (Thursday) I decided I was going to have a productive day, and wrote an ambitious list, starting with a new morning routine that involved preparing lunch before I had breakfast. Miraculously, that got done, as did most of the other things on the list, including a five mile, extremely cold and windy, bike ride. I spent a lot of time on Thursday processing kale. There's quite a bit of it, and it was a bit of a nuisance in our tiny temporary kitchen. Some of it I rubbed with a bit of oil, salt and smoked paprika and put in the dehydrator for a few hours to make kale chips. Some I blanched and froze in little blocks, ready to pull out and throw in soup or curry or whatever. I'll do another batch of those this morning (I could only find one baking tin). There's still quite a lot left - more in the freezer, more kale chips, and I might experiment with dehydrating and powdering some, to add a nutritional boost to soups and smoothies (this has the advantage of not taking up much space...).
I thought a lot about productivity yesterday. Yes, I was productive in terms of 'doing lots of things' (although most of those things were small, pottering tasks, not big, achieve-y ones), but I was also productive in terms of producing - in this case mostly veg in the garden, and future meals. There's something satisfying about that. So there are three days left of my holiday now. I've got a list of things I want to do, of course. Today and tomorrow we have visitors - it's been raining overnight but the sun is peeking out now and I hope things dry out a little. I want to finish the kitchen ceiling (four more pieces of plasterboard to go!), and finish processing all this kale, but other than that I have no big plans. I would like to go back to work with the house reasonably tidy though, so there's a bit of a sorting and decluttering mission going on there too. Right this second, though, I'm going to put the kettle on for another cup of tea, turn the heating on to defrost my fingers, let the chickens out of their run (they've been out of their house for a couple of hours, but left in the run to avoid early morning predators, and to encourage them to eat a proper breakfast), and do a bit of crocheting.
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Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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February 2024
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