A Bountiful Day In The Country For Me.

Receiving fabulous useful presents.

You have got to hand it to the proper & salt of the earth country folk. When they give you a present, it is 100% useful. Teach a gal to plant and Bob won't go hungry...! No need to stash it in the back of your cupboard so that you can haul it out when they come to visit.

Every town the world over, has a shop or two dedicated to selling knick - knacks that can only be kept in the back of your cupboard. Collecting dust and hauled out once a year to decide whether they should do more time in the cupboard. Oh, don't get me wrong, even I have bought stuff in one of those shops and have given presents from it. They just make it too darn cheap and jolly tempting to spend money in it. Of course they also up the cute - factor when they do the display in these shops!

But back to yesterday. Oh yes, I'm sure you can guess at my bounty. One lady gave me four tomato plants ( still in the infamous joghurt cup but already showing a shapely growth ), another gave me two different lots of seeds and of course I also got a few pieces of delicious Apple Strudel to take home with me. As you can see, no waste anywhere.

Living here with all the space and acreage about means that making a ' kitchen garden ' is a given. The X in the equation is how big you make it. Everyone has oodles of space but the question is if everyone has oodles of time and patience to tend to a kitchen garden? One man I went to visit yesterday, has planted a few long rows of potatoes.

" How many potatoes will you get from this? "

" Oh, we won't be able to finish these potatoes in a year."

( The kitchen garden is close to your front door and as the name says, it cultivates anything & everything you need to cook with in your kitchen. No pretty flowers there )

For some it is a hobby, for others it is a way of life and for others still a way to save money. The ground is respected and revered here. When you live in a rural area, you soon learn how precious, fickle and important nature is. Good weather equals good crops. When you are a farmer you need good crops to pay the bills.

The weather is not always kind. Over the weekend, our area had tremendously strong winds. Up to 100 kph. Gosh, even walking, I alternated between looking like a spaceman moving slowly and other times close to being bowled over. Nasty gusts of wind. Of course it blew a lot of the fruit off the trees. The cherry trees seemed to have come off worst.

As I said earlier, yesterday was a day of bounty for me. The best present of all, was when a lady who doesn't laugh a lot, was laughing so hard with we that she had tears in her eyes. Seeing her spirits lift was the best gift of all...

Biggi