Dusty work

With the start of the new week came chaos and dust, much to everyone's displeasure.

I spent a couple of hours after breakfast with my large chisel-enabled drill attacking the surprisingly tough 4-inch concrete floor in the utility room that had been poured directly on top of the original cotto tile flooring some years back instead of repairing the original floor - something of a suspect plan in that as the original floor starts to deteriorate you add hundreds of kilos of weight to it... The sooner it was out the better, and the more I got out, the worse state the floor appeared to be in. The mortar between the original two layers of tile was no more than sand now, or worse, just dust, heaps of it, and despite opting to push all rubble directly down into the apartment and working with the door closed, dust, like water, seems to always find a way and by lunchtime when I surfaced from the room literally every surface in the house was covered in a thick layer of dust.

Fortunately, spring had sprung and the weather was beautiful so we retreated outside for an al fresco lunch, breathing the clean air into our lungs, along with the smells of spring.

Lunch was a relaxed affair, largely because it was hard to tear ourselves away from the patio and the glorious weather, but also in part because Frateschi doesn't open until 14:30 and I needed a pile of new cotto tiles before I could go any further with the job.

After a trip to buy the tiles and picking the brain of Danilo in the yard about the materials used these days for re-laying a new floor in a traditional style, I loaded 4 packs of tiles into the boot and headed home.

Before getting started on the flooring I decided it prudent to take Reggie out for a walk just in case I got so involved in the job of cutting and laying tiles I didn't want to go out again so we hopped into the car and headed for the quarry near Vellano.

It was then back to work and making a start on replacing and fixing a few new beams before laying new tiles on top. The process for making a traditional floor like this is that you have very large chestnut beams embedded into the walls roughly every couple of metres, then at 90 degrees to these and laid on top you have much smaller chestnut beams, spaced so that you can lay the cotto tiles across them, then goes on a layer of concrete with steel mesh embedded, on top of which you lay your floor material - traditionally another layer of cotto tile.

The tiles I bought were 30 x 15 centimetres, so I spaced the new beams accordingly, only to find out that the tiles weren't as labelled and were an extra centimetre larger, meaning I had to cut that centimetre off most of the tiles - a painfully slow setback, but by the time darkness was approaching I had three of the four rows cut and laid. From beneath it was all starting to look rather beautiful - so much so that the remaining floor adjacent was now looking worse (by comparison) than before I started. This, combined with the fact that the general state of the floor in the utility room and office has turned out to be worse than it looks from beneath means we could end up needing to replace substantially more than we had originally planned (or hoped) to.

Tuesday was back to the noisy work of chiselling out a bit more floor so that I could safely get the next row of tiles laid, giving us a floor space big enough for the washing machine to go back onto - having decided the only feasible way to tackle this job is to re-do half of the utility room at a time.

The noisy work was done soon enough (although not soon enough for poor Helen who was the other side of a four-inch wall trying to work, wearing ear defenders but still struggling to cope with the noise level) and I was off to Frateschi to load up with concrete and steel mesh in the hope I could get the concrete down before lunchtime.

(You'll need the sound turned up to appreciate this video clip which gives you a taste of Helen's day):

I chatted with Paolo briefly to confirm Danilo's recommended method of flooring and loaded up with 200kgs of lightweight but super strong structural-grade concrete and slung a sheet of steel mesh on the roof before heading in to pay.

Back home and with the car unloaded, I was yet again wishing my mortar mixing drill hadn't died on me last year as I looked at the stack of concrete that needed mixing by hand - but there was nothing else for it but to get the spade and get stuck in.

As lunch approached and having successfully laid the first half of the floor I put tools away and tidied in readiness for a quick lunch before Samantha arrived for Helen's lesson.

(Not wanting to rub it in, but lunch was yet again outside in the sunshine.)

Having finally finished the homework Samantha set me three weeks ago, I spent a good half hour or so sitting in on the lesson, having it marked and corrected before I left Helen and Samantha to get on with the real work while I headed outside to tinker before I needed to head off to Pisa airport to collect Dave and Sarah who were returning from a trip to England.

It was an uneventful journey along the toll roads to Pisa, and as I approached the exit for the airport I saw the orange tail of the plane pass in front of me to land ten minutes early which meant only a short wait in the arrivals area before we all hopped in the car Pescia bound.

After dropping our friends to their car in Pescia I headed home to get the fire lit - spring may have sprung, making daytime temperatures in the high teens of late, but the evenings once dark are still chilly and it will be a few more weeks yet before we can stop using the wood burner of an evening.

Wednesday started with our group Italian lesson at our house, Johnny getting the usual greeting from Reggie although he soon settled into a snooze once we were all seated and drinking espresso.

It was a fun lesson, the major part of which was just conversational, as much as we could manage in Italian, before moving onto a comprehension exercise that Johnny had prepared for us on the invention and history of the famous Moka caffetiere, a fascinating end to the week's lesson and topical as the inventor, Signor Biagletti had recently died.

After a quick tour of the destruction in the utility room and apartment we had to usher everyone off the property so that Helen and I could dash to the bank before they closed for lunch to pay Anton the plumber his third instalment, having all but finished the job.

After the usual ten-minute saga of form filling and keyboard tapping that is required for us to be able to deduct the costs of the new installation from Helen's tax liabilities (it being an energy efficiency improvement to the home), we left the bank to walk Reggie along the river in town before heading home for lunch yet again in the sun. I can't tell you the difference this week's weather has made to our lives - all of a sudden winter is starting to seem like it was ages ago and that summer is just around the corner.

After lunch, I left Helen in peace for the afternoon and headed to Vellano to give Dave a hand pouring another concrete garden step to add to the 7 or 8 that we've been working on over the last few months - due to the weather since Christmas this was the first we've been able to do since December!

On Thursday, Dave yet again came to give me a hand for a couple hours and it was back to taking up concrete flooring and disrupting Helen's work environment.

The concrete was yet again tough going, but the fact that I had Dave helping remove the mess as I was making it made a huge difference and by the time midday arrived we had got almost the entirety of the concrete (in this room at least) up and out of the way.

Not only that but we finally stacked rain collection tanks 4,5 and 6 on top of 1,2 and 3 - something we'd been waiting to see done since they arrived on the back of an Albanian flat bed lorry almost a year ago, so something of a milestone although it will be some time yet before they are operational as I need to link all six tanks together next then divert the rear and front runs of guttering into an as yet non-existent 'first flush' system, after which it will fill the tanks (I'm sure by this point we'll be due an uncharacteristic dry spell).

I'm sure you're now bored of hearing about it but we ate lunch out on the patio before getting back to taking up the remainder of the concrete.

With the concrete finally up and sitting in a pile next the house it was back to Frateschi for more materials and a 25kg sack of seed potatoes ready for the weekend's planned planting.

Once Helen had had enough of the office for the day, we headed up to the quarry track above Vellano together with Reggie to give him a good run around, before popping into Amanda's shop to collect some vegetable peelings for our compost.

Friday was much the same as the other days: more work in the utility room, another visit to Frateschi, lunch outside on the patio and another afternoon spent in Vellano with David laying another concrete step. I came home at the end of the afternoon to find Helen weeding the veg beds after having cleared up the latest pile of rubble from the apartment floor. At the end of a dusty, dirty, noisy week we were both looking forward to getting out of the house and into the fresh air on the veg terraces for the weekend!

Back in the game

Having started last week with snow on the hills, Saturday morning was as if someone had flipped a switch and turned summer on - or at least spring. We awoke to a lovely mild morning with bright sunshine - and promptly took the opportunity to have our first al fresco breakfast of the year while taking in our view. This was definitely what we have been missing for several months - while it hasn't been a particularly cold winter per se, since Christmas it has felt as if it has been grey and damp almost continuously, and it was a welcome relief to feel the sun on our faces.

After breakfast it was time to take Reggie for a walk, so after a stop at Nerone for a coffee, we headed up the Sorana road and into the woods the other side of the village. We were soon stripping off layers and walking in t-shirts, such was the warmth of the sun - we could barely believe it was less than a week since the ground was covered in snow.

By the time we got back from our walk it was close to midday, so we opted for an early lunch - al fresco once again - before getting stuck into anything.

It was tempting just to sit on the patio, enjoy the view and the warmth of the sun on our faces all afternoon, but our consciences got the better of us and we turned our attentions to work. Stuart headed off to light a bonfire just beyond the washing line in order to get rid of some of the clippings from the olive pruning. Meanwhile, I got the strimmer out and headed up the terraces to carry on where Stuart had left off on Thursday.

This started well, but after a short while, the strimmer cord broke, so I had to traipse down the terraces and get Stuart to help manhandle the strimmer head apart in order to re-thread it. I headed back up the terraces, got going again... and then the cord broke again, so it was back down again.

The fourth time the strimmer cord broke and needed re-threading, Stuart decided to take matters into his own hands and to save me any more fruitless traipsing up and down the terraces, he headed out to go and buy both a new strimmer head and cord, leaving me to tend the bonfire while he was out.

The new materials worked a treat and I was soon strimming uninterrupted, and by 5pm had made good progress up the terraces.

We decided to call it a day at 5pm - with the excitement of our al fresco breakfast and lunch experiences earlier in the day, we had fully expected to spend an hour or so sitting on the patio enjoying a glass of wine in the evening sunshine after work, but it seems we'd got a little too carried away with ourselves. It is, after all, still only March. When the sun dipped behind the hill opposite us, just after 5pm, it felt decidedly chilly, so instead we decided to go indoors and light the fire, really feeling as if we'd earned a relaxing evening after our productive day.

We were treated to more blue skies and sunshine on Sunday morning - there was a fairly stiff breeze though, so it wasn't quite the weather for al fresco breakfast today, but bright and sunny nevertheless. After a quick bowl of porridge therefore we headed straight to Nerone's bar for a coffee before turning up the San Quirico road to take the increasingly impatient Reggie for his morning walk. We'd decided yesterday that we'd like to do a walk we haven't done in quite a while - the walk to the old mill at Stiappa. From last year's experience we know that this time of year is perfect for this particular walk, but in a month or so's time the path will be overgrown and harder to navigate.

As expected, the path was clear and lined with clusters of primroses, crocuses and helibores. When we got to the mill we let Reggie have a run around - we even tried throwing an abandoned frisbee we found down there for him, but he didn't seem to 'get' the game - running after it, stopping short of it, looking at it before running back to us empty-handed.

Walk done, we drove back down the valley for our regular Sunday stop at Amanda's shop for lunch, homework and a piece of bread for Reggie from Samantha - I'm sure in Reggie's head Samantha is 'bread person', and it certainly seems to have cemented their friendship.

Once home, we heated up our lunch and tried to decide whether it was warm enough for an al fresco lunch. The verdict was a resounding 'yes' - the house sheltered the patio from the breeze and while not quite as warm as yesterday, the sunshine was plenty warm enough to make it feel very pleasant.

Once again, after we'd finished our lunch we were sorely tempted to sit and enjoy the weather and the view and have a lazy afternoon in the sun, but once again our consciences got the better of us. I'd only managed to finish half of the terraces yesterday and was determined to get them all done, and while it was far too windy for another bonfire today, Stuart had his own ideas of other jobs to turn his hand to.

I headed up the terraces with the strimmer while Stuart took his chainsaw and cut down an acacia tree from the edge of the car parking area. He then used his military-grade rope (donated to us by our friend Paul) and his boy scouts knowledge of knot tying to tie the rope around the tree and pull it up the slope using the tractor. This particular tree was not destined for chopping, splitting and adding to the wood pile (much to my disappointment), but a plan had clearly taken shape in Stuart's head and the tree was an integral part of it.

When I traipsed down the terraces after an hour or so to refuel the strimmer, I found Stuart with the tree trunk on our patio - he seemed to be creating a beautiful trip hazard feature on the patio. Little did I know that it would soon turn into an attractive border for the gravelled area that would keep those pesky pieces of gravel where they are meant to be!

Just as I was about to head back up the terraces, Reggie started barking - heralding the arrival of our friend Paul who'd popped in to see us on his way back from Pescia. Stuart and Paul were soon sipping a beer on the terrace, and it wasn't long before Reggie decided to give up the volley of barking and settle down in the sun, which was a relief for everyone's ears. After half an hour or so I left the boys to it and headed back up the terraces with the strimmer, determined to finish the job before the day was out.

Stuart continued with his project after Paul had left, and by the time I finally finished the strimming, the tree was looking a lot less like a trip hazard and a lot more like an attractive border - with a cleanly swept patio to boot.

So after a second satisfying day's work in beautiful weather, we came indoors, lit the fire, had hot showers and relaxed with a glass of wine that, once again, we felt we'd really earned.

Come on spring... we're coming out fighting!

On Monday I went down to the apartment to evaluate the situation. You may remember that we'd left it a little like this:

Errrrr. Whoops! What happened to our lovely apartment!?

After some much needed help from Helen at the weekend to clean up the worst of the mess and flip the plasterboard over and lay it onto the floor for protection, we'd decided to try and keep the beautiful old chestnut beams exposed, but not without a certain amount of effort.

After taking down the plasterboard, it had become clear that the state of the floor/ceiling above and the beams themselves was somewhat questionable in places. Forever looking for the positives in the situations we find ourselves in, we realised that had we not taken down the ceiling (and made such an enormous mess of the apartment and given ourselves such a huge job to do), we would never have known that there was anything wrong with the ceiling and would have happily continued oblivious, perhaps until someone fell through a hole from above or the ceiling collapsed into the apartment below... 

Found the original cast iron waste u-bend.

Rather suspect looking repairs that had been hidden by the plasterboard ceiling.

I decided to upgrade two of the fake beams that had previously been holding the plasterboard in place to real beams. Said fake beams had previously been stained a rather gaudy shade of orangey brown, so first I used my wire brush to remove the old stain, before fixing them into place as actual integral parts of the ceiling and beam structure.

My wire brush working wonders on the orange-stained beams.

Two new beams in place and redundant waste removed - just need a cap for the 110mm pipe.

With that done it was time for lunch followed by a dash into the village to show the doctor my thyroid test results (from several weeks ago) to be greeted with a full waiting room - not helpful for productivity but it it gave me an hour and a quarter to read some more of the book I'm currently reading, which has been passed from Helen's Mum, Jill, to Helen and now onto me: 'War in the Val d'Orcia' - a fascinating read.

After getting a 'very good' appraisal from my doctor on the blood test and blood pressure fronts, I left with a prescription for an asthma inhaler (I've never before suffered from this but my breathing had been heavy of late, the Doctor said it's just the time of year... well, we'll see).

On Tuesday morning, Helen headed down to the apartment in a miserable-looking morning: low, heavy cloud after a night of heavy rain did little for my own motivation to get up, so I stayed under the covers for another hour until Helen returned to hop into the shower.

By the time she came out of the shower I was gazing across the valley from my cosy spot in bed at the snow dusted hills above Pietrabuona! The heavy cloud had all of a sudden cleared to reveal the white dusting below.

After breakfast, and as Helen was waiting for some work to arrive, we both headed out for a walk with Reggie. We decided to use the chicken run walk along the river, knowing it would be nice and quiet on a school day (and a cold and damp one at that), which it was - we didn't see another soul.

After the walk, we refuelled the car at the nearby methane station and headed home for lunch and a quick tidy before Chris arrived to do a little video editing with me. I had recently offered to help him out with a promotional video for Pescia Rugby Club in order to help them raise some much needed funding, and today we'd arranged for him to come up and make a start.

He arrived clutching a laptop, a tablet PC and a video camera, and after a couple of coffees we got to work for the afternoon making small but significant progress. Sue came to collect Chris at the end of the afternoon, which made for the perfect opportunity for an impromptu glass of wine and a chat.

There will be no sneak previews of the video, but rest assured that when it is finally finished, I'll be sharing it where possible to try and help their cause - the club, which Chris and Sue set up themselves and run on an entirely voluntary basis and free-of charge (participation in any form of sport for kids in Italy is usually very expensive), desperately needs a proper training ground and better facilities to keep expanding and to continue bringing the joy of rugby to local school kids.

Wednesday was our group Italian lesson day, so after breakfast we left Reggie at home with Florence (in separate rooms of course) and headed up to Vellano to meet the gang for our lesson. The lesson was based around our homework from the previous week, concentrating on two different types of past tense (the passato prossimo and imperfetto), which took us all lesson to work through and took us up until almost midday before we'd finished with the usual chit-chat afterwards.

The snowy view from Vellano.

After lunch, I decided to take Reggie out for a walk as I knew that if I got started with work in the apartment before doing so, he would be unlikely to get one at all.

Reggie and I headed back up to Vellano to the quarry track in the hope that we might see a little of the snow that had fallen the day before and sure enough there was still a smattering around. The track itself was clear, but amongst the trees and higher up at the reservoir there was plenty for Reggie to enjoy rolling around in.

First snow of the winter...for us at least.

Reggie enjoying his snowy walk.

On Thursday it was back to work as normal and I spent a couple of hours with my large hammer chisel drill taking up more of the concrete floor in our utility room to facilitate the needed repairs in the ceiling below. This was not conducive to Helen's work, as you can imagine, with only a 4-inch block wall separating us, but by lunchtime I'd make enough of a mess to be able to stop.

By today, the cold and wet weather of recent days had well and truly passed and we enjoyed a glorious lunch outside on the veranda for the first time in a long time - which made it really feel like spring was heading our way (which then instilled a mild panic into me, knowing how much we still have to do before spring arrives and all I've done in the last week is add more work to our to-do list!).

After lunch, we got ready for Samantha's visit, as Helen's lesson had been moved to Thursday this week. At this point I had no choice but to turn my attentions to much quieter work, and it was with this excuse that I left the apartment in its 'just been bombed' state and instead did a few things outside to make myself feel a little better about the advance of spring.

As Helen worked on her ever-improving Italian indoors, I got to enjoy the glorious sunshine outdoors while I tended to the chickens, test-painted one of three inherited concrete plant pots with some copper-effect paint we'd bought months ago, and turned out all of the last year's compost ready for transporting to the veg garden (and what a heap we had! over 300 litres I would guess, or four large sacks).

Chickens diving into the small compost heap, wire netting not quite up to their weight though.

Fresh compost...over 300 litres of it! But could still do with more...

Oi... copper! No, not that copper, think I'll do the other two!

Finally, I made a start on the terrace strimming, which desperately needed doing with the grass on the verge of getting out of hand.

As I finished the tank of fuel in the strimmer, Helen emerged with Samantha to head together into Pescia for Helen's first Italian hair cut. Samantha had kindly made Helen an appointment with her own hairdresser and was taking her down there and planning to act as interpretor for this all-important first meeting (to make sure she didn't come out with bright red hair, as quite often seems to be the fashion around here).

In the hour I had before going to collect Helen, I dismantled the temporary greenhouse (frost shelter) outside the house as I was keen to prune our citrus trees. The RHS advises to prune citrus trees in February, and we were already 10 days or so into March, but such was the snug fit of the greenhouse I wasn't going to be able to prune without dismantling it (I clearly hadn't thought that through when constructing it). Since the weather forecast was now for good weather for at least the next ten days, I wasted no time in dismantling the greenhouse, feeling safe in the knowledge that we wouldn't be seeing any frosts any time soon.

Soon after discovering two stowaway lemons that had somehow grown to full size without us seeing them, I was Pescia-bound with Reggie in the back of the car so that we could give him a short walk once I'd found Helen.

Surprise!

I parked in the piazza and walked in the general direction of where I knew the hairdresser's salon to be and soon spotted a beautiful lady walking my way, who I could see was smiling at me from a distance. Of course I returned the smile (it would have been rude not to wouldn't it?) and of course it was Helen, who was indeed looking beautiful with her perfectly blow-dried hair, looking like she'd never seen a day's farm work in her life.

After a short dog walk along the river, during which we spotted Donatella walking Ray on the opposite side, we made a short stop at the Phillips's to drop off a tripod for some video camera work and headed home to light the fire.

Friday was a fairly uneventful day: I had agreed for Chris to come up again after lunch to continue working on the rugby video, which meant that before lunch I needed both to walk Reggie and to do the supermarket shopping. Neither of these activities were worthy of remark other than to say that, being the crazy and spontaneous sort that am, I decided to do the food shopping backwards, starting at the bottled water and working backward to the fresh veg - and I managed the entire shop without forgetting anything (I realise it's possibly a little early to be making such a bold claim, I'll only be able to do so with impunity once the week has passed and we haven't starved).

The afternoon was once again spent thrashing out more of the rugby video over numerous cups of strong coffee and tea before Chris was collected by Sue at the end of the day, leaving us to open a bottle of wine and enjoy an evening's TV in front of a very toasty fire looking forward to what was forecast to be a sunny weekend ahead.

First seeds sown!

After a dry day on Friday that even saw me able to get out of the office and into the garden for a couple of hours after I'd finished work in the afternoon to cut and strim the grass, we were really hoping that the forecasters had got it wrong and that the weekend of rain they were threatening us with wasn't actually going to happen - but sure enough, as we sat watching TV on Friday night, the familiar sound of rain drumming on the roof window started up and continued intermittently throughout the night.

We awoke on Saturday to grey skies but without anything actually falling from the sky (so far), so after breakfast we headed straight out with Reggie for his morning walk. Like last Saturday, we went up the valley, stopped off at the Bistrot in Vellano for a quick cappuccino, before continuing on to the cava track. The track at the cava leads uphill through the woods and we've often commented on the fact that some days it seems as if it's steeper than others - no doubt this varies according to how much sleep we've had, whether we've been doing strenuous physical work, whether we've had a late night and so on. Today, for whatever reason, was a steep day. Reggie seemed relatively calm on the way up the track, making us wonder if he was finding it a steep day too, but he made up for it on the return leg, cantering off into the woods leaving us wondering where he'd got to, before reappearing further down the path and tearing back up to us. We encountered a few light raindrops while walking, but managed to get back to the car before anything of significance - the skies looked foreboding over the hills at the top of the valley though, and it felt as if someone had turned a light off.

By the time we got back after our walk it was 11am. Now came the tough decision: should we bite the bullet and go and get the supermarket shopping done, knowing that we would be hitting the busiest time of the day (week, even), or should we wait it out until lunchtime when we knew the shops would be quieter, but meaning that we had an hour and a half to fill - not long enough to get our teeth into anything significant. We kicked ourselves for not having got the shopping done on Friday night, and with a certain amount of resentment decided to get it over and done with.

This is not something we will be repeating any time soon - both Lidl and Esselunga were heaving and I sensed that we were each only just clinging onto our sense of humour by our fingernails.

Once home and the shopping had been unpacked, the mood lightened over a lunch of bread, cheese and salami - a bit of a cliché in this part of the world, but it's been a long time since we've had what our friends Paul & Marie have coined a "pick-n-mix" lunch. The cheeses we'd bought - tomino (a soft, brie-like cheese) wrapped in pancetta, which we warmed in a pan before serving, as well as a hard, cave-aged pecorino - were delicious, as was the fennel-flavoured salami.

After lunch we gave Reggie a bone to keep him occupied in the house while we headed down to the apartment as by this time it was wet outside and unless he has company or something to occupy him, Reggie has a habit of opening the front door and letting himself out - which would be fine if (a) he could close the door behind him and/or (b) he could let himself back in again!

The first task of the afternoon was to start the mammoth clear-up operation in the apartment. That is, round one of the clear-up operation - we started cleaning up knowing full well that we would only be making more mess very shortly.

With Stuart having taken the false ceiling down in the apartment bedroom on Friday afternoon, the floor and every surface was covered in dust, dirt, pieces of broken plasterboard and a certain amount of ... ahem... rodent waste. It seems that at some point the cavity walls/suspended ceiling have made a cosy home for small furry squatters - which I suppose shouldn't come as a great surprise in a house of this age in the middle of the countryside.

What happened to our beautiful apartment?

After an hour or so of sweeping and laying down old pieces of plasterboard on the floor to protect the floor tiles from things falling on them from above, Stuart turned his attention to removing the old waste pipe from the ceiling. We suspect that the main reason for there being a false ceiling in the apartment bedroom was to hide the waste pipes from the bathroom directly above it. Now that said bathroom has been decommissioned (and is now the utility room), there is no longer any need for the waste pipes to be there, so out they came. Meanwhile, I started to chisel out some of the old and crumbly mortar between the ceiling joists. As we now plan to open up the ceiling to expose the chestnut beams and the cotto tiles, there is a certain amount of repair work and beautifying to be done, the start of which is to knock out the old crumbling mortar and start again.

It wasn't long until we both ran out of steam - and with the rain now hammering down outside, along with an alarmingly fierce wind blowing, we decided to make a run for it back to the house to have showers, change, light the fire and turn our attention to less strenuous activities.

While I updated the blog, Stuart turned his hand to making a batch of marmalade - we'd bought bags of oranges for this purpose last weekend, but hadn't got around to doing it, so we spent the evening with the distinctive aroma of marmalade permeating the house as it bubbled away on the stove.

It turned into quite a late night in the end - largely thanks to the marmalade making, but we ended the night with 26 jars of marmalade for our efforts before retiring to bed.

We awoke early on Sunday morning to the sound of hail on the roof window, so we didn't rush to get up, knowing the weather was inclement. By the time we did finally get out of the house at around 9.30am, the rain had eased off, although the sky still looked threatening.

After a stop at Cafe Delice for a cappuccino and pastry, we took Reggie for a run out along the river at the chicken run. There was a distinctly chilly wind, and although we were spared rain for most of the walk, there was at one point a short sharp downpour which left us wishing we'd brought an umbrella out with us, even Reggie running back to us for shelter before realising we weren't carrying one of those rain-sheltering devices!

After our walk, we stopped off at Amanda's shop for lunch and to collect this week's homework before coming back home.

By the time we'd finished lunch, the weather had done a full turnaround and the sun was shining brightly. We'd earmarked the afternoon for finally getting some seeds planted so headed straight down to the poly tunnel. On opening the door of the poly tunnel we were hit by a wave of warm air - the temptation to just get a couple of garden chairs and settle down for a post-lunch doze was hard to resist, but with a whole tray of seed packets staring at us and the year marching on, we knew we needed to get on with the job.

We therefore spent the next two hours planting all manner of vegetables - we must have sowed over 100 individual plants of 26 different varieties, religiously labelling them and noting them down on a list so that we know what we've planted and when. We are hoping that we will be a little more successful at spreading things out this year, and will have a variety of vegetables ready to harvest at any one time, rather than having a glut of one thing followed by a glut of another. With that in mind, we plan to do another round of planting in a couple of weeks' time.

By the time it got to 4.30pm, the temperature had noticeably dropped, even in the poly tunnel, and with no more shelf space and rapidly running out of plant pots we decided to call it a day.

This evening we have been for dinner by our good friends the Phillipses - it's been way too long since we've managed to coordinate a get-together and proper catch up with them, so we are really looking forward to a social evening to round off the weekend.