Beautiful weather

September is normally lovely, but it rained a lot this year. It is making up for it in October with days and days, weeks even of beautiful sunshine.

Doug is busy doing the bedroom, though has been outdoors a bit to do some strimming.
I am mostly busy clearing the area in the Potager where we are going to plant some fruit trees.

This is the bank they are going to go on.

Before

After

There was a giant holly bush, with hawthorn and brambles for good measure, at the right of the picture - but Doug cut that down last week. We have burnt lots of the branches and mess - it took days and days to drag it all out and burn it.

We also took advantage of the nice weather to take the horses out. We took a route near the house that goes up through the woods then along the ridge above the house.

Exciting trip to the DIY shop

Ok not that exciting really. But a little bit as I have not been for ages - clearly Doug comes here a lot so less interesting for him.
We went to buy a sander for the ceiling in the bedroom as the one we have has a teeny surface and would take Doug the rest of his life to finish the ceiling with.

We also got all kinds of other useful things.

Sorting the garden out

The potager has been a bit neglected in my final few weeks at work then the rush to get the field fenced and the flat in London sorted. It has been borth warm and wet in that time which has encouraged very enthusiastic growth of weeds and grass. I spent half a day strimming it.

Before

After

Doug has chopped down a massive massive holly tree that was on the slope in front of the potager. I have also been chopping it up and burning the bits that aren't big enough to be worth drying and keeping for the heating boiler.

This resulted in a huge huge huge unfeasibly huge pile of stuff to be dragged down to the fire in front of the house and burnt.
It doesn't really show here but most of the stuff in the photo is rubble that needs clearing up, it should all be grass

This is one tiny fraction of it.

Preserving things

We have many many apples so I have tried pasturising some juice. I haven't done very much in case it doesn't work out, if it does we will do more next year. For some reason it tastes more sour than the same juice not pasturised, I will have to add a little sugar next time.

This is our juicer, it is good because you can put whole apples in it, however it makes quite a mess and makes very foamy juice that has to be allowed to settle then the juice poured out from under the foam to get the lovely clear juice.

I also made Rose-hip and Apple Jelly with rose-hips we picked up in the mountains. It didn't use that many apples as we only had enough rose-hips for one jar.

Not apple related I made some mango chutney as I am on a never ending mission to find the right recipe. It needs to mature a bit before we find out, but it is looking better than previous versions (they all come out looking too much like mango and not as clear and shiny looking as 'real' mango chutney. This lot was made with very ripe mangos which I think could be the difference. I should have boiled the fruit a bit more before adding the sugar and I think more sugar would give a better texture possibly. However I expect it to taste good.

Chicks and baby rabbits

Not very seasonal but we have chicks and baby rabbits!

Lismore has gone to the abattoir

We will get the meat back in 10 days.

She was a cute cow, but we have too many, so one of them had to DIE and it seemed better to keep the Jerseys and the Highlands as the calves will be easier to sell. We are hoping for as delicious as Bif, no reason why she shouldn't be, she was half highand and half jersey which should be YUMMY. We have kept the skin and have hopefully found someone to tan it for us as doing it ourselves didn't work out very well on Bif's skin.

Bye Lismore, thank you for being a sweet cow and hope you had a happy life!

Day on the beach

It was sunny, so we skived off doing the bedroom and clearing up the land for a day and went to the beach - Erromardie, near San Jean de Luz, it is our favorite beach because you can park close to it and it has rocks sheltering it which makes swimming safer.

View from the cliff above the beach.