Bone dry

This weather is wreaking havoc on my garden, and I read Frantic's recent post about mulching with interest. I do water my veggies, but not all of them all of the time.  I prioritise the ones in troughs and in pots, and then the beans.  Beans seem to be very thirsty, so they get a watering can full each day on each section of beans.  Unfortunately, I have emptied the water butt, and I am having to use mains water now.  I am not very happy about that but I am resisting the temptation to moan at the FH about it - he is "waiting" for a friend of a friend to source him some barrels of some kind......we've been waiting over a year, and well, they aren't here.  I am sure that if this dry spell goes on, and there will be others, the money I will spend on mains water would easily have bought a couple of new water butts.  I should have just bought them myself and got on with it!  The potatoes are pathetic and the beetroot are very small.

We had the first picking off the dwarf beans today and I shall cook them tomorrow.  Picking little and often seems to be the way to go with them.  We love beans and I have plenty of them growing this year.  There are courgettes forming on the plants now, and the raspberries are fruiting too.  The gooseberry plants have failed to produce anything beyond a few leaves, though, which is a shame.  UJ's garden is producing very well - we have been brought more strawberries today, as well as peas in the pod.  The FH and UJ sat in the sitting room this afternoon, one shelling peas and the other taking the green bits out of the top of the berries.  That was after they had had a snooze to help to digest their lunch from going to the Lunch Club!

We have had a very long Governors' meeting tonight - nearly three hours, as there was so much to get through with it being the end of the year, and the last meeting.  It has been another challenging year, but we continue to move forward slowly.  We had a presentation tonight about the pros and cons of becoming an academy - hardly an easy topic and one with lots of pitfalls, it seems.  Decisions, decisions!

I am tentatively asking the girls what they would like for their birthdays, as they are both coming up in August - the YFG first, turning 14, and then the EFG making it to driving-lesson age at 17.  Oh, boy!  17 - how did that happen so quickly?  One thing is for certain - she won't be getting a car!