AAAAAAGH! AND CHUTNEY RECIPE

Today we have going to the gym - we have had going to the gym - we are glad it is over.
Today I - well in a minute.
Today R went into the garden and picked flowers for I and L who are coming to lunch tomorrow.

The cosmos are still bursting with colour and fill vases in the house. They do have one snag and that is that they shed pollen as they age and make a bit of a mess of the surface they are on.

I trundled around the garden with my new little Sony camera (the canon G9 is dead) and admired the work of our strimmerer up in the woodland.

In the spring it will be a sea of red campion, woundwort, pignut, bulbs and so on

Oh! Yes, R has cut back the pink Japanese anemone so now I must go a-digging and reduce its domain.

And moi?
In order, I saw there was a big digger, tractor and trailer at the horses below the house. So I nipped down the track and he agreed to leave me a wonderful heap of well rotted manure.
Hooray! No 47 wheelbarrow journeys down the lane this year. I can pop out of the gate across the cattle grid and fill up as I wish.

Then the gym. After that lunch and a post prandial snooze before I went ditch digging by the copper beech hedge, plunging the spade into the turf and opening up the overgrown channel.
OW! Yarroo! I say chaps! I stuck my spade into a wasp's nest. I have not run so fast for years! Only two stings - one on my left hand and the other through my shirt on my tum but Ooooh! They hurt so much more than a bee sting.

So off to the garden centre for some foam I can spray at them from 3 metres away - I know, not the Buddhist thing but I want to dig that ditch without pain.

I bought a bag of bulb fibre as well for the Sarah Raven and J Parker orders have come. Hyacinths potted up in the famille vert bowl, lilies in  another pot and two deep red amaryllis - now all in a dark cupboard upstairs till mid November.

Finally I have made a load of green tomato chutney - it is in the Aga bottom simmering away at this moment. I hope to sell it at the Church Christmas Fair (if it is edible) and raise some money for R.

Recipe derived from Delia S. Great one Delia (up Norwich Football Club). (Or as I am a vague Liverpool supporter up Norwich FC.)

1 kg minced up green tomatoes
1 kg peeled and roughly chopped baking apples (including 3 off our Bramley)
about 800g peeled and chopped onions
Bung in a big pan and add 6 crushed garlic cloves, 0.5 kg raisins, 600g soft brown sugar, 0.5 tablespoon cayenne, 1 heaped dessertspoon ground ginger, 1.75 litres malt vinegar, 0.5 tablespoon salt.
Give it all a good stir.
Wrap up 25g of pickling spice in muslin and tie up - hang in pan.
bring to boil, simmer 3.5 hours stirring well especially at end.
It is done when thickened, almost all vinegar gone and spoon leaves a trail in surface.
Bottle into hot jars.

Yum!

I hope you noticed the modern me full of decimals and metrics
It is probably a side effect of the wasp sting.

Hello! Bell has gone - time to stir and stir, 1 hour gone (and put in the salt as I have forgotten it).

R has just said I am a wimp - re wasp bite - she has just been bitten by an earwig!