welsh hills again

I didn't appreciate before I started to grow food on a reasonably large scale - domestic scale still, but lots of it - that there is no stage between the one where you get excited about the three real pears on your little pear tree, bring them inside to a bowl on the kitchen table, feel them gently every day as they ripen (pears ripen much better inside than on the tree), finally eat one in ecstacy, the juice running deliriously down your chin, and the stage where you are bringing them inside in buckets. How can this be?  It was the same with the damsons and the plums so I suspect our gloriously warm and dry spring (do you remember?) was just what the fruit crop wanted.  The same holds true for vegetable crops of course.  One day you are cutting your first beans and eating them simply dressed with butter and drooling at their deliciousness.  The next you are wilting slightly in the face of trugs full of the things marching into the kitchen, each bean as long and...

Well here I am with another evening on my own and this time I am up here without a car. The wind has been battering the house all day so inside has been the only place to be and here by the woodburner the wind is blowing in the chimney and making the flames leap higher. All day the wind has shouted and shuddered and thrown great showers of rain at the house. Astonishingly the hens, who have been shut into the run all week while I have been away visiting my daughter, were so desperate to get out that they have spent the day being buffeted about the garden, their feathers blown inside out like a bad hair day, struggling against the wind and rain, hiding in the bottom of hedges but determinedly not going back into the henhouse until nightfall. I, by contrast, have been huddled by the fire, half watching the rugby and half reading the paper. I decided that a good use of a few hours being shut in against the weather would be to make my Christmas cake and Christmas pudding so all day the rai...