wettish monday

It started wet today, so I'd beaten the housework into submission by 9am!!

I still wake up at farmer o'clock!!! At least the BBC World Service tends to be interesting at 4am.....

The rain was easing and it was trying to dry, so on went the washing!

Meanwhile I sieved and mixed and sieved a couple of new batches of stock glazes and one iron red glaze test ( from the blog of Edouarde Bastarache, a French canadian potter and inveterate materials and glaze tester!).
This has no lithium carbonate, so cheaper and less nasties. It also has Cornish Stone and Bone Ash...so I'm surmising a nice buttery surface and a bright colour!
I'll post photos and recipe if it works for me.

A quick salad sandwich lunch, and the breeze was up and drying- then so was the washing!!

The Carpenter was filling in an online application....why can't they make the required answers a little more obvious?

That done we went to the garden. He trimmed the grass on his patch with a sickle and tried to work out where to plant the next young oak tree. There are two ash and one birch in pots too, waiting for a new home. We worked on the ideas for the building of the New Shed. Ideas are coming together, looks like I could have a new shed before too long...at long last!!

I picked fruit, blackcurrants and whitecurrants. The birds have only just found the latter, despite them now being all ripe. I think we'll be taking more cuttings of those. Then another mushroom tray's worth of strawberries, some a little early yet again, but they have rain damage. At least they are well usable, and if I'd left them they would have rotted. There are yet more to ripen and pick, all being well, plus the plants are putting out yet more flowers, as well as runners.

I must mark those plants that I want in the new strawberry bed. I'll move the healthiest of the older plants(those that are about a year or two old) as well as youngsters. I've worked out which bed it will be, I think, and only short term crops are going in there, so that it can have plenty of compost dug in, plus some well rotted pony manure, before it becomes a strawberry bed.

Planted out the sweetcorn and some spring onions and potted on all the surviving cucurbits.

The garden is rapidly filling, and I'm interplanting too!

Harvested a small lettuce and some peas and swiss chard before going back to the house.

I would dearly love a house a little apart from the village, where we could garden as we wished, with no car fumes and pesky motorbikes going past! Somewhere where I could have a workshop to myself and a saltglaze kiln, and....and.....and....!!