Sunday in nature

My gosh hasn't it rained over the weekend! Not that we didn't need it, but I did still experience this sinking - oh no, please don't say this is going to continue all autumn and into winter - feeling because it can get awfully claustrophobic inside all the time and I loathe driving in the rain as it gets rather slippery through the lanes.

Still Ewan and I managed a swim in the sea on Saturday afternoon, down at Amarres, a good call on Ewan's part, we have never swam there before and it is great as you can go off the jetty and immediately you are in deep water,so you are forced to swim about for a bit...which is what we did, before getting out and getting changed in the rain, yuck. Still we were comforted by a trip to Costa on the way back home - there is indeed something very comforting about warm and frothy soya milk, washed down with a shot of decaffeinated coffee!

Saturday night we watched Nikita, well I didn't watch that much of Nikita as I had my head buried in a pillow for much of it as I just cannot stand watching violence these days - it just fills the head with all sorts of negativity and is not conducive to a restful night's sleep. And I have to admit while we may have been in bed by 10.30pm (and on a Saturday night too, I love it, back to the olden days!) and not up again until 9am the following morning, I did not feel I had rested in the slightest with all those Nikita induced weird dreams.

So Sunday dawned raining and windy, and it was indeed rather challenging to drag oneself out of bed, but we did as we had decided to go on a mission to collect fallen pine combs at the Guet. Only it was about 10.30am by the time we made it there (not like the olden days with my parents when they would drag us out of bed before dawn to be the first ones at the Guet to have our pick of the fallen branches and pine combs)and there were quite a few people milling around already so we really did have to get off the beaten track to find our stash.



Actually it was a fun 30 minutes, not that I am anywhere near as competitive these days as I may have been in the past, but still it is a bit of a game, seeing if you can find more pine combs than anyone else. There as a moment when I almost - and quite literally - jumped out of my skin. There we were wandering around the middle of the Guet when all of a sudden I noticed 4 guys in camouflage lying on their stomachs, completely still, about 5 metres away from us, with guns pointing in our direction. Ewan did not seem the slightest bit perturbed as he changed our course away from them rather into them as we had been walking, while I was having a mini melt down, my heart was pounding and I had to stifle a giggle (nerves you see).

I guess they were playing some sort of game or it was a training exercise or something, I saw them later on, moving silently from tree to tree, good grief, there should be warnings about this sort of thing - admittedly there were a few women and children in combat attire up at the main carpark, which should have given it away a little, but still, you really don't expect to see men with guns on a nice sedate "picking up pine combs at the Guet" Sunday morning walk with the churc only down the road!

I spent the afternoon with my Mum helping her start to clear out the greenhouse for the winter time. We weeded all the beds and took out the melon plants, the massive courgette plants (have you seen the size of these things, quiet incredible in comparison to the size of the courgettes!)and some of the tomato plants which have produced their best for the season. We collected all the squash in from outside and cleared away the plants - the squash are disappointing this year, in fact lots of things are disappointing this year, nature seems to be all over the place, the squash are much smaller than usual, which is a shame as Mum and I both love eating them and they are so good for us too!

There were tons of tomatoes to pick and also aubergine, red peppers, courgettes and beans. Then we pulled up some carrots and new potatoes and also picked a few blueberries and raspberries (see nature has gone strange, these should have finished weeks ago). I love being in the greenhosue - well actually I like being outside more - but I love being around all the plants and learning from my Mum. She has done so well, she even has Thai basil and lemon grass growing these days and is keen to establish some tea plants and even grow coffee at some stage. Pretty cool.

We had a bonfire to burn a lot of the fallen and dried leaves and dried out brambles from a few weeks ago. There are a couple of apple trees in the orchard outside so I picked some of these - incredible how many earwigs are eating their way through all the fruit - and then I wandered up the lane, down the road from my parents' house, where there is an overgrown patch of a field with the biggest and most juicy blackberrries I have seen this season. Great stuff. We also managed to do all the composting, now that is a smelly job!

So by the time Ewan came to collect me at 6pm I was a touch on the tired and yet elated side, completely dirty and smelly but with a box full of organic and fresh produce, great stuff! We did the recycling before going back home and while Ewan popped out to see his Mum I set to work in the kitchen, roasting off lots of the tomatoes to make into tomato puree as a base for sauces in the next few months, and making a ratatouille mix for Ewan's dinner, as well as boiling some seaweed and eggs and simmering some quinoa to stock the fridge for lunch the next few days.

Needless to say it was an early night for me although I got woken when Ewan came to bed as the cat has fallen asleep at my feet and Ewan insisted she went into the spare room, but of course as soon as we put her in the spare room she wanted to come straight backs into our room, you know how it is with cats, they like to be warm and snug and get their own way. Finally she stopped making a fuss the other side of the door and we managed to get some sleep, in fact I slept for abut 11 hours, lucky me!

xxx