Race night at the village hall – all in aid of a good cause

I should really leave the onions to dry out for a few more days, but I was keen to follow a new method of stringing that I saw on YouTube today.

This small string is now hanging with the shallots and garlics in the onion barn. Plenty more to string next week.

Butternut squash soup, lentils with onion and chilli, a dish of roast pumpkin, onion, squash and pears with breadcrumbs and cheese and a corn on the cob.

Hatched on 1st September and the size of large bumble bees.

Now, 18 days later, they are fat and feathery and still growing. See the jam jar lid in the picture above and the bottom photo below to get an idea of the sizes.

Early this morning Lily and Lucy were grazing happily (we thought) outside the wooden post and rail fence but inside the boundary hedge which is protected by electric fencing. Waiting for rain and short on grass, we were keen to let the cows munch on this strip of land before we have to begin feeding them hay. I was cooking pasta to take to mum for lunch in London when our friend and neighbour turned up with a cow halter in her hand. She had received a call from another local who had seen Lily out on the road. Luckily she had made her way back to her mother Lucy but she was now on the wrong side of the electric wires. I turned off the stove and ran to get two buckets of cattle concentrates whilst Phil and Kate blocked Lily’s escape route. Luckily our cows and sheep are slaves to their stomachs. At the sight of the buckets Lily stepped over the wire without a backward glance and both cows followed me and the buckets around to the field gate and inside the sturdy post and rail to join the sheep. Tonight Lily looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Hmmmmm!

One of the retreaters (here for walking and yoga) turned out to be in the year above me at the wonderful Camden School for Girls. Founded by the visionary Victorian women’s educator, Frances Mary Buss, it was the non fee paying sister school to The North London Collegiate School ( and far more cool and hip, of course!). The retreater and I shared a mutual friend and in the course of the two days this lovely women suggested that I bottle some of our surplus Conference pears. Good call…..thank you.

With a climbing cat

Click below

The winter store of onions was pulled up yesterday and is now drying on outdoor pallets. They will need plaiting and hanging on Sunday and Monday. A big task but they should see us through to well into the new year.

Click below to see the geese walking back to the pond through the goose gate.

Inside the quail barn a female sits silent and still on a nest of eggs