A Family Affair
Just got back from the vets again with Pattie. £146. We’re still waiting on fecal results and probably having her in tomorrow for blood tests. Then she may have a general for x-rays. That may cost us almost £300. She only cost us 50p.
This is the thing about having animals that are primarily pets. You want to do the best for them, so you pay through the nose to give them the best chance you can. What else can we do? This country produced her, exploited her, and was going to chuck her away. So fingers crossed little Pattie will pull through whatever is making her ill.
In other news…
I was going to post on this a while ago, but with the ten million other things occupying me I didn’t get around to it. On Easter Sunday, instead of the traditional chocolate egg, my mother turned up on our doorstep with a freshly baked apple and raspberry crumble which turned out to be quite a family affair. Let me explain myself - no, Mum didn’t mill the flour by hand or churn the butter herself (although, if you vigorously shake double cream in a bag until your arm almost falls off, you can make butter yourself), or refine the sugar at home. But she did collect the raspberries from my grandmother’s raspberry canes, and she did use the cooking apples that my aunt had been storing from last autumn’s bumper crop. So with my family’s input, we were presented with a very tasty crumble. Needless to say really that it “mysteriously” completely vanished overnight, never to be seen again.
When I was madly baking cakes for people at work, when I had a ‘regular’ job, i started off by using what we referred to as ‘Ditch Jam’. It was basically jam made from the pickings of a few rambles in the countryside by my Mum’s best friend. She’d pick up a few bits and pieces each time she went for a walk (leaving enough for the mice, birdies et al) and chanced upon a hedgerow (not too close to a road either), and then would go home and make up a nice big batch of jam. There’s no set Ditch Jam recipe, it’s a case of bung in what you can find - wild blackberries, sloes, haws, elderberries, crab apples (fantastic for adding pectin into the mix), wild damsons, rosehips…
I am a jam and preserving novice, our grandmother’s preserving pan does the rounds in the family, but I’ve yet to make use of it. I asked on freecycle if anyone had one spare to no avail. I would like to try something with our crab apples, damsons and Victoria plums here on the Smallest Smallholding, but the moths get them every year. I’m too soft to put up those horrible moth traps, so I’m on the lookout for a plum moth deterrent this year.