The autumn harvest has started with the plums. Last year we had about six in total – this year I have already picked more than 20lb. I’m having to pick them as soon as they are anything approaching ripe, because otherwise they are eaten by a combination of deer, jays and wasps, so rather than […]
Three red deer have moved into our garden. I think they are a mother, her fawn of this year, and a yearling stag who is presumably her fawn from last year. I guess he will be leaving her to look for his own herd soon as his antlers are just coming through. All three of […]
I made J a birthday cake – this was what the lemon curd was for, but I didn’t want to say in my article before because he reads this blog and I wanted the cake to be a surprise. J is a big fan of Qonqr – which is a location based mobile phone wargame […]
Many years ago my friend J and I used to play a very good board game called Imperial Governor. We played it so much in fact that when J came across our single copy of the game a few weeks ago, it was literally dropping to pieces and not playable in its current state. So […]
We have a variety of foodstuffs out for the birds, one of which is a fat ball feeder which until recently was used only for its designated purpose of feeding the tits (we have blue tits, great tits and coal tits in great numbers). Not even the squirrels could manage to get to it – […]
I made some lemon curd today which is something I haven’t tried since I was a girl. I used the BBC recipe, and it was super easy to make and (even though I say so myself) super delicious – about as far as you get from the synthetic looking florescent yellow stuff that my father […]
Actually Cats into the Bag… We have been having to fetch one of our two snow Bengals, Tora, back from the village at regular intervals (we think he has a lady friend down there). Most of the time we take the car because it is a pain trying to walk him back to the house […]
Since early summer, the normally prolific chaffinches had virtually disappeared on our bird feeders, and had been supplanted by huge numbers of siskins. For some reason, although they are a larger bird, the chaffinches seem rather scared of the little siskins. Then this week, within the span of 48 hours, all the siskins have departed, […]
I’ve been doing a lot of baking of late (getting ready for the new series of the Bake Off which starts shortly). I ventured into rough puff pastry for the first time recently, and as it proved so successful, I tried two new recipes with it. The first was from a book called “Cookery for […]
I know the picture isn’t a bat, but bear with me. A few months ago I said to R that the cats were a bit past their best and rather too old and slow to catch things any more. How wrong can anyone be; quite aside from Tora and his little expeditions to the village […]
