Gardening

It made a change last night to be woken by my daughter as for the last week it has been the dog - he has been eating chick food which has had the expected consequences - I'm not sure his system is used to that much roughage :-/ I obviously haven't been feeding him chick food deliberately but he is a dog so will stick his nose into anything remotely edible. Anyway Amber had a headache but didn't want Calpol or Nurofen but was going for the 2am whinge and 'but-I-can't-sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep' option. It didn't go down very well especially as I was in a filthy mood as my knitting project (a simple headband) had needed me to unpick it 3 times and then once more for luck when I managed to slip all the stitches off my needle. I had had an emergency phone call to Nicky about purling and knitting but I was so cross as it is meant to be enjoyable and relaxing and it was really really neither at all. However, I have just put in my halfway marker so hopefully I will have a pic of that soon though I will need to decorate it heavily to hide the holes and wonky stitches.

I went in the garden and hoiked out all the blighted tomato plants and rescued all the others before they too became stricken:



Hopefully they will ripen rather than rot. It was lovely to spend some time in the garden, I always forget how therapeutic it is. I now have a clear-ish bed to plant my winter veg:

I have decided that next year I won't bother with summer veg and instead concentrate on having a cutting garden as I have thoroughly enjoyed having cut flowers in the house. I took some cuttings from Jude the Obscure which is the rose that gets the most compliments:

And I want to plant lots of sunflowers and have a proper sweet pea wigwam. It will look gorgeous! I also had time to watch some bees:

And the chicks had a good run inbetween rain showers. I managed to get some more wellies which cost a small fortune but I do wear them pretty much every day.

One other comment: I went to the home-ed group yesterday which was bursting at the seams, incidentally, but one of the new people was a real live home-educated adult! Yes! He's a chef, in his 20's and local so that was rather exciting given it's all a bit of an unknown quantity for me so it's good to meet people who have been through the system. Or rather not been through the system...