A bits & pieces kind of week ............

Holes Mayıs 02, 2022

Monday Morning Greetings dear friends & readers

My Closing Down Sale has been ticking along nicely & I am so thankful to those that have purchased from me enabling me to reduce my stock considerably

As I have been selling the stock at 50% off I have not at any time felt sad about this, which makes me feel in my heart this is 100% the right decision for me at this time.

The Mr has been milking the past month while our worker has time off.
Last week I offered to come & help him ...... this was uncharacteristically generous of me but indeed I had a
method in my madness
Every year The Mr grows Japanese millet at the farm as a supplement feed - some of it gets made into silage & the rest is break fed to the herd.
I knew the herd only had 2 more days left on the millet & I wanted some seed heads to dry .... I find this is a great filler for the bags of citrus potpourri I make up & sell

Here are the girls enjoying their fresh break of millet while I put up a new electric fence

My photo above shows the seed heads on the plant & then the bunches that I hang to dry at home

The covered area just outside my lounge is nice & dry with good air circulation & the bunches dry really well just here

My dehydrator has been working overtime while I dry trays of oranges off our trees
Although I am no longer selling my citrus potpourri in the Cottage I am supplying this lovely Farm Shop with it

The house smelt delicious this weekend while I bagged up another 20 bags to send over to them

I took a large handful of the fresh mixture & filled the vintage scales that sit on my kitchen bench for a splash of colour

Each New Year I begin knitting some new cotton dishcloths for the kitchen & take the older tatty ones as cleaning rags ... this is a tip I learnt from Rhonda's books

I enjoy the repetitiveness of the garter stitch at nights when my eyes are too tired to do anything more intricate

I stitched a simple bookmark on linen to go with my friend Joyce's 70th birthday "chair planter"
The pattern is an early design from Jenny's Stitchery Club ... I hope to stitch up some more bookmarks
for my present box.

I have been picking & drying this years statice .... usually this would be hung for sale in my Cottage but this year
I get to keep it for myself !

I found an old wooden bucket in my sleepout to display the dried bunches in.
It's always a "lucky dip" when I grow statice & this year I didn't get any yellow, but I was equally as happy with the colours that did grow