Meeting new Smallholders

Adam, our guy from shared lives is here for the weekend. For my recent followers/ readers the Shared Lives Scheme is run by Social Services and places adults with particular needs in ordinary homes where they "share the lives".We offer day and respite care to three guys, who I call Adam, Bob and Colin in this blog. D. likes to call them his "work experience guys" as all three like to work on the smallholding, helping and learning and joining in with everything we do. They are in effect members of our family. Adam has been coming to stay with us at weekends since he was 18 and he is now 43, so he really is like a member of the family. Bob and Colin come during the week, staying for the day. D. involves them with the community work we do. Some of this is helping to restore the derelict canal that runs through our village, sometimes we litter pick or cut back shrub and weeds.
Today Adam and D. have been attempting to put up some guttering around the workshop. I say "attempting" as after travelling to a not-so-near suppliers for connectors etc for the guttering, they found that half the stuff they bought would not fit. I think the language would have been bluer had not Adam been holding the other end of the guttering!
Meanwhile I was doing my own cussing while attempting to load and print out a document that the Chair of our Civic Society had emailed me. She had sent it in a different format to the one I usually use when printing out our Newsletter. Eventually, YD turned up and sorted it out for me, loading "cutePDF" that enabled me to start printing out the 250-odd copies of the 6-sided Newsletter. I shall do this over the next couple of days and post them next week.
Yesterday I said that I didn't know that people were going to descend on us yesterday. This wasn't strictly true as we DID expect a couple of women who were considering keeping bees. YD had met them when she was visiting them as potential foster dog carers for the Labrador Rescue . (yes, they were PERFECT for the job) They have been smallholding for a short while now and wanted to talk to someone about keeping bees. So YD invited them to come and talk to us. We really enjoyed talking to this delightful women - mother and daughter -and felt again the excitement and the promise of being new smallholders. I do hope we will see them again.

 Adam's favourite chicken pie tonight (made from left-overs from last time we had roast chicken) with mashed potatoes and cabbage. No room for pud. Phew! Good job - I hadn't made one!

Hello and welcome to Sumdayiwillc and pattyinstitches I'm so pleased that you have chosen to follow my ramblings.
I've had an extraordinary number of "hits" on my blog over the last couple of days. Looking at the stats the referring source is Rhona's "Down to Earth" an Australian blog I have followed since I began blogging. She had put a link to my blog for suggested reading over the weekend after I had made a very short comment on growing garlic on her blog. Rhonda Jean, who is also an author, has five and a half THOUSAND followers! rightly so - pop over to have a look if you haven't already -  she is HUGE.

The weather has been mixed today and it has been difficult to settle to anything outside because of that. I'm hoping that I can settle down to clearing one of the gardens tomorrow, getting ready to let the chickens out of the orchard for the winter.
Back soon.
 Take care of yourselves
Gillx