But before any of that… There’s been a lot of people here recently, many of them visitors. I like visitors, the whole house seems more exciting, I like the comings and goings, the general bustle, but especially I like the big meals all together. We had a particularly good one last weekend, down in the campsite at the bottom of the garden. Sam and I cooked a vegetable tagine over a campfire, which we had with couscous and mint tea, then Sam brought out an amazing Summer pudding (which, for Northerners like me who’d never heard of it, is one of these). It was really nice with about ten of of us on picnic mats around the fire, with the shafts of sunlight highlighted in the smoke. Safe even from the intermittent showers under the cover of the big beech trees.
Those intermittent showers have pretty much continued constantly throughout August, probably peaking this weekend, which is a shame because we’ve got lots of visitors again. Luckily they don’t seem to be too put off by the rain, but it’s playing havoc with my lawn mowering schedule! I suppose that’s what you get when you let kids have a big holiday off school.
Anyway, that rain has meant it’s been hard to get a good time for me and Sam to really finish off the bender. But today we did! Over the past few days we’ve got lots of withies and wove them into the base of the bender (had to put lots more stakes in to give them something to weave in and out of), making a bit of an edge to it. And today we took the tarpaulin off, covered the skeleton with old blankets and things, and then put more tarpaulin on it, covering the whole thing nicely. Then we got another tarp to line the inside, and covered that with blankets and stuff. Now its all snug and ready for some cushions and bean bags and lanterns to make it a lovely place to spend the night.
We’ve rather proud of that really.
Anyway, onto the main tragedy that came with the bad weather – the bean tripods have been felled! Collapsed all over the leeks! The bamboo was no match for the combined forces of the wind and the weight of the beans…
I’ve done my best to prop it up, but it’s going to struggle. Still, we’ve had a huge amount of beans over the last month or two.
Last but not least, we’ve expecting the polytunnel to be erected next weekend when we’ve got some handy relatives coming (although I don’t think they knew we’d earmarked their time here… hope they’ll still come!). So I’ve got a bit of groundwork to do. Dad and I have been trying to mark out the exact location of where it will be, using trigonometry and everything, but still having trouble getting it right! But I thought I’d try to do a ‘before and after’ type photo thing… watch this space!
Think of us in the storms predicted for tonight!
Nethergrove Community 
