ia play

It’s been a postively pastoral bank holiday weekend, in which I…

• skinned the bunny. Urgh. Not much choice about this as Pileswasp had killed it the day before and then broken his collarbone and two ribs, putting him out of bunny skinning action.
• made rabbit & leek pie. Our leeks and homepage pastry. Herculean effort but tasty.
• made bread. With old fashioned yeast rather than the speedy packet stuff. A faff but way more yeast smells in the house. And biscuits.
• made chicken of the woods pasta. Another picking up the baton for the injured husband. He brought the giant mushroom home from a pre-injury forage and it needed eating.
• harvested shed loads of herbs for cocktails and yoghurt sauce for burgers (lemon balm, borage, fennel, chives and mint, I think)
• made pork, leek & noodle hotpot. That’s the last of our leeks.

All gently satisfying in “I grew this/picked this” way. Or in a gruesomely satisfying way for the “I butchered this” bit.
Continued the pastoral theme with garden activities:

• potted on the morning glories, mina lobata and fuschias
• sowed late courgettes and pumpkins
• weeded lots (and then fed it all to the rabbits)
• moved some succulents around to try and defeat the blasted slugs

But it wasn’t all John Seymour. I did some 21st Century stuff too.

• wrote my FUMSI editorial for June
• started my latest OU course – Archaeology (going to be a challenge to get IA themes out of that one!). Admittedly the topic is a bit backward looking but the OU is all digital these days.
• wrote lots of blog posts
• started secret mission, inspired by big sis. More on that later…

Why so productive? Well three days feels like space to do stuff. And being around someone who is only really able to watch telly and surf the net made me really appreciate my ability to do practical stuff. And I guess the coffee was good.

One of the 10 happiness principles put forward in Making Slough Happy was ‘plant something and nurture it’.

I’m halfway there this morning. I’ve planted basil, parsley, rocket, chard, lettuce, verbena and mina lobata. (Iain plants all the serious vegetables. I get the herbs and frivolous flowers)

Just got to get the nuturing bit right now.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Cicero