In memory of  Algy @algyseramachicken I loved him very much. He is much missed, several years now since his passing. Such a lovely companion at workshops and festivals such as @greengathering_ @springgreensdeli @green_gathering_permaculture

His son, Jimmy, was just as daft!

Blue Ginger Gallery. An afternoon with The Sisterhood of Ruralists; and then an evening with Jackie Morris

I had a really lovely day out last week .

I had a meeting in the morning in the Frome valley near the Herefordshire/Worcestershire border, so after my meeting I went to Blue-Ginger Gallery in Cradley to meet up with Jackie Morris, Hannah Willow and Tamsin Abbott, who were all artists in residence for the afternoon creating postcard sized artwork in aid of The Big Draw.

This is the Dragon van of Jackie Morris in the car park  - Tell me a Dragon, in mobile form! I felt so excited when I saw it :)

Jackie, concentrating on painting a Hare

Jackie, Tamsin and Hannah all at work making beautiful things

Jackie working on the beautiful hare

Hannah cutting into some birthday cake :)

Some of Hannah's beautiful craft


All three of the artists were delightful to chat to, and I am amazed they were able to talk AND create wonderful art at the same time! I wish I could just create the art!

They are all lovely, lovely people and I felt very honoured that they were willing to chat to me and work. This was a drop in session so  I did not have to pay for the honour and, although I did buy some wonderful stuff, I did not have to and there was no fee involved :)

I SO love indy galleries and bookshops for putting on events like this :) Thank you to Jackie, Hannah and Tamsin and thank you to Sue for hosting the event.




Then later I went back for a magical evening (yes for this I paid for a ticket and was lucky to get one as they sold out really fast!) listening to Jackie telling tales from some of her latest books and talking about her craft and how she sets about writing. Magical, simply wonderful.

I also ate some lovely food and drank some nice wine provided by Sue Lim of Blue-Ginger Gallery, and had lovely conversations with other members in the audience.

It was a wonderful evening. If you ever have the chance to listen to Jackie speak and read from her books I urge you to go - she is a wonderful storyteller and is warm, witty and very engaging as a speaker. I had a magical evening listening to her read and talk and answer questions from the floor.

 Then I went home and when I got home despite being tired I started reading East of the Sun, West of the Moon; and I stayed up until 2 am so I could finish it in one sitting .I drank in the rhyme and the beauty and the words and feasted my eyes on the sumptuous illustrations which oh-so-perfectly enhanced the words.

I honestly could NOT put the book down until I had read to the end. And then I cried. THAT is how good a writer and illustrator Jackie is :)   

And then I went off to bed, to dream of bears and hares and cats.

Seriously, you need to go and listen to Jackie speak if you can -and you need to buy her books. All are so fabulous both as tales and as art.

I had SUCH a great evening. Thank you Jackie.


You can read more about Jackie's tour of the UK here 

I finally cracked...

ha ha 

and tonight , despite a very aching bad back. went out and drove around a fair bit of my local patch in order to get four fertile eggs for Nutmeg my broody, 5 year old, virtually stopped laying eggs, ginger hybrid, (never had one gone broody before). She is now settled on them and gave an aprreciative purr after I put them under her

Watching her tuck the eggs under her, croon a bit and "nestle down" on them made my back ache from driving to get the eggs ( thank you Jo at Hansnett farm ) worth while

The things I do for my hens.

 She was SO pleased and  I feel very happy that I could make her so content

*If* ( big ask I know) she manages to hatch them I will have a very interesting mix of chicks - but am not counting my chicks before they have hatched,...! Just happy to let her try to do what Nature is asking of her

RIP Tiny Hen

RIP Tiny Hen :( 

She died in her sleep this morning :-(  She didn't look poorly last night, just a bit tired with the heat. I think she may have been trying to lay an egg and just died. She looked very peaceful.

I am making a new flower bed full of bee attracting flowers and she (her ashes) has been buried in the middle of it.

Tiny Hen, small but top hen in every way. She was still terrorising the cats and trying to get into the house yesterday

 This is what she looked like back in March 2012

Tiny Hen became a house hen  this time last year, she became very weak and was being bullied by the others to the point of terror and had stopped eating or drinking. I brought her inside and gave her food, water, love and cuddles. Gradually she recovered and grew her feathers back and became a very feisty, bold little hen:)

Tiny Hen was rescued from an "Barn" system, so she  lived crowded together with thousands of other hens, under artificial light, inside a huge shed. Never seeing daylight or going outside. "Colony"  or "Enriched"  eggs mean the hens are also shut  inside a small cage, inside the huge shed.

If you do buy free range eggs already  - Babs, Bunty, Titch, and Marjoram the ex battery hen thank you from the bottom of their hearts , as do I.

If you don't - please - for the sake of hens like Babs, Bunty, Titch and all their sister hens still in barns and cages - switch to buying free range eggs - it is the only way to make sure that the eggs you buy come from hens that have had a reasonable life. 

Tiny Hen was very sweet, I loved her a lot and I am very sad that she has died, but I am very happy to have given her 15 months of freedom, love, friendship and sunshine.

RIP little hen, fly high and free.

Thank you for reading :-)

Happy Birthday Compostman

Today marks 30 years of us first starting out as a possible couple. We had " a date" on this day in 1983. I went to his house for a birthday tea and we ate home made cherry cake - I was impressed then at his culinary skills and I still am, now!

Happy Birthday Compostman - we have been married for 28 years now and are still together, despite a lot of difficulties, and  I love you  very very much. Even more than I did 30 years ago!

xxx

Cat love

 Tom Cat and Cassiopea in a cuddle on the sofa

I love my cats and fortunately, they love each other ( most of the time!)

Halloween/Samhain

The end of the old year and the start of the new year.

I have walked in the wood today and watched the leaves as they came whirling down, broken free from the tree by the wind to land on the ground and slowly return to the soil.

I caught a leaf as it fell through a shaft of sunlight and made a wish.

I spent today outside, tending to my plants and animals and family, weaving the threads of love and nurturing around them all to make them comfortable and secure.

I shall sit by the fire tonight, with candles lit, and think of all my loved ones, my friends and family, animal and people. Those I still see in life and those who have gone on before me.

Wishing you a thoughtful day.

Coincidences, Freecycle and the power of love.

I answered a post on Freecycle Hereford which popped into my inbox a few days ago offering a roll of weed suppressing fabric and I was in luck!

Both I and the person offering the fabric have been having email issues, so on Tuesday I got an email from another person, who turned out to be the wife of the offerer.

At the end of the message telling me how to collect the fabric she asked "how are the hens" and signed the message "Kim".

I wondered for a bit, then thought maybe the lady was "Kim from Hereford" who sometimes leaves comments on here....so would know about my hens...as I couldn't think of ANYONE else called Kim who I know...

I called her number and it WAS! She had recognised my email address and thought it might be me!

So I went into Hereford with Compostman and Compostgirl on Wednesday, to have a family medical appointment and then we walked across town to a lovely little craft knitting and fabric shop called Badder, where I met the lovely Kim and got my weed suppressing fabric and handed over some eggs from "the girls" as a thank you. Compostgirl was enchanted to meet a 9 month old Labradoodle called Bruno ( who was SO cute, just like a big sheep and so friendly!)

We had a good old chat with Kim and then we left, to go back via High Town. Compostman went off to collect some AV kit ( more on this anon) and Compostgirl and I walked through the very lovely Hereford High Town to look at a Council run Safety fair, Safe, Sound and Sorted, with advice on car seats and bullying and fire safety and all sorts of things...Compostgirl got given a very nice rucksack and some traffic leaflets and stuff, I got an anti bullying t shirt, we both had a go at plate spinning, then we met up with Compostman and all three of us had our photo taken by Wyvern FM look at number 323 in the gallery for a bigger image!





and we admired a stilt walker....



So despite it being a very sad sort of day for me, we all DID have a good day...and being with my family made me feel much better about everything ...

Love....as I said in my last post, that is what it is all about. I love my husband and daughter very much. I treasure the time we spend together and the small, everyday things we do. I love to see Compostgirl laughing at a ridiculously tall stilt man, and see her delight at a circus trick. I love the smile I see on Compostman's face when he spots us in a crowd, when he has gone off to do something and then come back to meet up with us somewhere.

Love....the best thing in the whole wide world and something to be said to our loved ones and to be shouted about.

A thank you.

Thank you all for your kind thoughts about my earlier post.

I loved my Mum very much and I miss her very much. This day is always a hard day for me and it actually gets worse as I get older, in a way, because I am a Mum now and all the things I do here, the preserving, growing, chickens, making wine etc, well my Mum was SO good at all that and I remember her doing all of it so vividly.

I would love to have her here, to see what we do here at Compost Mansions (oh how she would love it here!), to meet her grandchild and for me to ask her questions...I have SO many questions I would ask her and so many things I want to say to her.

I only ever had my Mum as a child, I lost her, to talk to, when I was 10 and I really miss not having had a mum to talk to, as an adult.

Ho hum...it has actually been a good-ish day, I have resolutely avoided all the Hillsborough stuff, not because I don't care, (I do, oh how I do...) but because for the last 20 years that is all this day has meant to every body else and I have always felt somehow *my* single loss paled in comparison with the deaths of all those poor people.....I know that sounds a bit silly, but having thought about it, I look back now and realise that is how I have felt.

My post about my Mum earlier today was partly to claim this day back for her and for me (but without wanting to be disrespectful to other people and their grief).

Also I realised I tended not to talk about my Mum, partly because, well, we just don't talk about death, do we?

Also I suffered a lot for being "different" as a teenager, having a mum who was not there at events, who lived in hospital and was "not the same" as other peoples mums...there was a stigma attached, somehow?...I got, not bullied exactly...but certainly I suffered from some very unkind, thoughtless words at school.

So...my post, whilst not being the first time I have ever discussed my Mum, was certainly the most public discussion I have ever had!

And while I didn't intend to upset anyone, I hope you all realise how precious love is, and how we should nurture it, welcome it, treasure it and live each day to the full, joyously and with an open heart....and that we should tell those we love, that we love them. And show it, each and every day.

because we only get to live today once.

I have learned that the hard way.

So, thank you all for your kind thoughts, they did help, and I thank you for them.


love, Sarah x