Well it's Tuesday morning, it's been raining hard for the last 32 hours, it's still raining and I discovered yesterday that I have a leak in my roof which is coming in through the bathroom ceiling. It's so bad I have had to put a bowl underneath it to catch the drips! I have no idea what I'm going to do apart from keeping everything crossed that the rain will stop, but I'm sure that something will come to me.

On a more positive note, I harvested my first apple yesterday. In fact I picked two and made an apple crumble with them, they were delicious :-)

My tomatoes on the other hand are looking very sorry for themselves. Most of them haven't ripened and I'm not sure what I should do with them. I don't know if they will ripen by themselves if I pick them and put them on a windowsill or whether I should be looking up a recipe for green tomato chutney. Any thoughts??



I'm not ready for Autumn, it's caught me completely on the hop. I haven't done my final lawn mowing of the year, I haven't collected any sticks or fallen logs for the fire, which I start doing at the end of August before the weather turns nasty, I haven't bought any coal for the fire and I haven't started filling up the freezer for the Winter in case of snow. I know the last one sounds a bit odd but I live at the bottom of a valley and have been snowed in a couple of times before so I always like to make sure I have enough food for both myself and all the animals to last if it happens again. I feel as if I need to rush and start getting ready for Winter and I seem to have an overwhelming urge to start baking and cooking and stocking up ........ weird!!

Anyway, today I am going to start to rectify the situation, I'm going to bake lots of bread, some pies and casseroles and a couple of cakes and I'm going to start filling up the freezer. I'm also going to go through the cupboards and see what I'm short of and make a shopping list for payday so I can go and stock up. I might even look into something like Approved Food. I have heard good things about the bargains you can get from there and I might see if it's worth placing an order. It would be interesting to hear if any of you have used Approved Food and have any useful tips?? 

I was sitting on my sofa last night, snuggled up with a couple of cats on my knees and a dog sitting on my feet listening to the rain lashing the windows. The weather here in Cornwall, as in many places, has been truly horrible. It's rained and rained and rained and before that the wind was so strong that the top of one of my trees snapped off and a huge branch from another tree broke off and squashed part of the fence in my field. As soon as the weather improves, I will have to move the branch and repair the fence although how I'm going to move it my myself I haven't figured out yet. Never mind, I'm sure it will be ok.

Well, it's now Sunday morning, I have just been out to check on the llamas and to check the state of the field. The llamas are ok, I moved them into the small field further away from the river yesterday so they are fine. My field, however, is not so fine. The river burst it's banks and the resulting torrent of water that swept through my field has covered three quarters of it with leaves, logs and other debris and there is now also a thick layer of silt covering all the grass. In addition to all the debris, a very large tree was washed through the field and has demolished about 25 feet of fencing and the sheer volume of water has washed away a good two foot of river bank. The river, usually a nice gentle burble is now a raging torrent so I will have to wait until the water goes down before it's safe enough for me to fix any of the fencing.

The clean-up from this is going to take a while, although, I am really very fortunate. My family is ok, my animals are ok and my house is ok and for that I am very thankful. It could have been a lot worse and I'm sure there are many people who have not been so fortunate. The forecast for today and tomorrow is still looking a bit grim but hopefully the weathermen will be right and there will be a some fine weather next week and I will be able to start clearing up the mess ....... fingers crossed!