Thursday 13th August 09

I had a late start as at 2am when I'd finished watching Cell on BBC4, I went down the garden to lie on the trampoline to watch Perseids, and saw two good ones plus what I think was an 'Iridium Flare', where a satellite's solar panels briefly reflect sunlight. It was travelling South East between 2am and 2.30am.

Then I came in and Gill and I went up to the loft where we have a Velux window, and we saw a dozen good meteors between us... lovely!

But it meant we didn't get to bed til 3.30am.

So, a late start but I got up when I heard the phone, and it was for me, a Fiddlesticks booking confirmation. After this I had a very busy day... I did a lot of harvesting... poppy seeds, spinach, a courgette, some small but yummy 'Pink Fir Apple' potatoes, and whilst a young friend was here, I used the large stepladder to pick tiny pears from the huge tree mid-way down our garden. These usually ripen at the end of August and are eaten by wasps and starlings before we can get to them. So I picked what I could, dropping them to the waiting hands of the willing child helper, who caught 80% of them.

I did a bit of pruning too, some of the finished fruiting spurs of the loganberries which were sticking out a long way into the shared passageway, and a vigorous ivy. And I did some chainsawing and splitting.

Gill did a delicious tea with some of the crops... I enjoyed the spinach, tomato and Bulgar wheat portion of the meal best. But Gill's quiche was a close second. Or maybe it was the blackberry and loganberry crumble with custard which was the best bit?

At 7.30 I cycled fast into town as there was a York in Transition meeting at The Hansom Cab in Market St. This was an unstructured meeting to follow up the discussions that YiT members had at their weekend at Nook Barn a few weekends ago. I enjoyed this meeting as it flowed freely and everybody contributed, it was lively and good humoured, with 9 of us attending. We addressed the criticism that YiT was a 'Church of Transition' and just met and discussed worthy issues but didn't DO anything. We reviewed the big events we've organised, the many smaller events, the satellite Transition groups which have spawned from us and are being nurtured by us, and debated what we should be doing in the future and how we should do it. A few firm conclusions were arrived at, and we decided to have the next YiT meeting in the pub as it was obviously the right place to attract good numbers of people and have good communication.

I got home at 10pm with a sack of Country Fresh compostables and 6 bags from Gladys, who rang earlier to ask me to collect her garden clippings.

I spent a long time during the evening preparing pears... some I stewed in red wine and mead, others I cut into 6 slices and put for drying.