For the joy of it

It is clear there will be challenges. Well let's be honest, there already are.  H was up at the crack of something horrible to go for a second interview with Lidl, which it appears is the blue ribband of part time jobs. She did some shelf stacking, they asked her if lifting five trays of yoghurt was too much for her (at her current job, she hefts about 25kg sacks of animal feed!)  and she was duly interviewed. She forgot to ask what happens next so we now await ... something.

Boo was catching up on mocks, which she missed as result of gadding about  doing study days in Oxford, and as the sun was shining and my week has been minced stuffed and baked twice over, and this was quite possibly my only day to get  anything done, I planted stuff and cleared out the greenhouse.

I'm actually excited about the chance to get right back to roots. We've been trying so desperately to turn everything we do into a business for so long, I've forgotten what it's like to do the things I used to do for joy, for joy.

I know it's going to be hard. We're looking into selling all the goats, pretty much all the sheep, the pony. Gulp. But. We'll have Boo's sheep to care for. They are sweet, and slightly bonkers, and purebred and few in number. When H goes off to Uni for at least four days a week, I'll have her little horse to care for, and he's pure gold.

On Friday, for the first time in - ever? - I sat down to watch episode one in a season of Gardener's World (I do love me a bit of Monty and Nigel) and thought about my garden, and growing veg just for my  family.

Today, I planted a square bed of red onions. Just one pack, from the feedstore where H works. It was brilliant. They are our onions. The garden at the field that was once our CSA garden will lie idle this year. If we're lucky, we might add some compost, even build the odd bed, for future use, but by and large it will do nothing, unless perchance it becomes a pig pen. That's not out of the question.

The garden beside our house - roughly the size of an allotment, and pretty much our own, personal, in splendid isolation. allotment garden - will be home to our vegetables. The flowers I'd already started as a potential business, will now become beds and borders and hopefully armfulls of cut flowers for our own pure joy.

That is, if I get this job!

Possibly because of the sunshine, there was a little bit of heart singing today.