House of Beth: Now is a time of growth and produce and harvest and sharing that harvest

It has been a busy month and summer is not the time for sitting inside and writing blogs but I don't really want to go outside and deal with yet another broken windbreak which was protecting my tender sweetcorn!

So far though, summer has not been the disaster I thought a Mulranny summer might be. The weather has been pretty great and when Rachel and Annie came over, we spent most of our time on the beach!

FRIENDS

We had a grand old time with Craig, Amy and Andrew. We made our second dinner party where we paired the food with the beer and I think it went well, we definitely got a bit drunk so it is hard to know....

Our good friend Felicity joined us

We have also been hanging out with our new friends. For Shavuot this year, we had our own harvest party! About 20 of our new friends came down, lots of the ladies from Craft and lots of neighbours. Some of the men asked Josh to join Wednesday night poker club so he was very pleased about that :)

We hope everyone had a good time and we made WAY too much food which included (not to brag but yes to brag):
Wild nettle and wild garlic pesto pasta
Mini nettle and garlic burgers with my own buns
home grown salad
a lot of pickled vegetables
2 cheese cakes
several kinds of vegan biscuits and A WHOLE LOT OF BEER - although surprisingly, a lot of the Irish men don't drink at all.

I have also started my first shift volunteering at the environmental and Old Irish Goat Society shop :) After a few hours there, one of my new friends took me to lunch at Yvonne's tea room - a new little coffee shop in the village set up in the old house of the family. The owner told me how he shared his room (a little room!) with his seven brothers and his two sisters shared with his parents across the hall :0!

My new friend told me a whole bunch of stories which really deserve there own blog but in the meantime... a great one was how she once borrowed a nun's habit and wore it all the way to America to surprise her cousins! And she told me about growing up here, how she lost her parents at a young age and her and her brothers just pulled together because no one else was going to look after them and grew their food and baked the bread and stole bikes if they couldn't find another way to get to the dances. She is a pretty impressive lady, like most folk here who have had a pretty tough time one way or another. You wouldn't know it though, they don't complain over here except about politicians - that international complaint.

PRESERVING

I have been preserving like CRAY, especially to get ready for the new shop opening at St Brendans soon.

NETTLE SHAMPOO INGREDIENTS

WILD ROSE OILS

LABELS HAVE ARRIVED! with rose and nettle cleanser tea

CANDIED WILD ROSE PETALS

GROWING

Well there are a good few of us up at the tunnels now. Brendan and Henry, two Brians and Tom. One of those Brian's is taking Josh and me fishing for Mackerel soon and taught me some Irish. They have been weeding and watering like crazy and Brendan showed me how to keep blight off my potatoes so I think we are going to have some pretty fab vegetables. Our turnips, beetroot, carrot and salad have all been cropped several times.