Don't leaf

I'm not sure if the nasturtiums are trying to stop me leaving the veg garden, or stop me getting in. Either way, I think tomorrow we need to tie them up and possibly throw some of them in a salad. The path, since you ask, is a job for autumn and I'm currently ignoring it. I couldn't, however, ignore all the slugs who I caught in the damp this morning - mostly hiding underneath the courgettes and lettuce. Aside from chopping them in half on a stone with a sharp stick (I didn't have my scissors with me) I discovered that our wire fence is perfect for crushing them against.

We had our first salad from the garden this lunchtime, a bit later than I'd been expecting, and not quite the salad I expected. The first lot of lettuce I grew rotted in the rubbish wet cold spring, so the lettuce that is currently going great guns needs another week or so before harvest. Today's lunch was beetroot tops (the beetroot needed thinning) with some baby roasted beetroot and lots of smoked mackerel. (Plus tomatoes for Mr B - not from the garden yet...)

This morning's teaching went well, despite a night of sleep disturbed by Mr B's fidgeting. The kids all fell for my "last lesson of the year so we'll have to work really hard and do a test" line, before I admitted that we were actually just going to play. A number game and pictionary went down well, and a new girl in the little class will (if I'm teaching them next year) up the standards a bit I think. CarbBoy and the other British boy in the 7-8 year old class were allowed to come to the lesson today and, of course, sabotaged the lesson entirely! Still, it was fun (up until the 'whatever you like' pictionary session where L-R (a girl) decided to draw boobs. I told her it was such a good picture she should put it in her exercise book so her teacher could see it....)

The lunchtime session saw the older kids practising a play they have written for their end of term party (the boys were reluctantly dragged away from their football game), and the other kids with me playing Simon Says and Hangman. The teachers were in a meeting so the session overran by about half an hour, and when the head teacher arrived to tell me I could finally go home, we were playing a very physical game of "Prison Ball" (as I hastily called it in English) - it being ballon prisonier in the original form).

Later, lots of gardening, potting up some spare tomatoes and chillies for a friend, and helping Mr B with a thousand and one computer things.

After another inch and a half of rain last night, this morning wascold enough to have me dragging out jumpers and my coat. Hopefully we will return to summer tomorrow...