Bunny alert!

The day is being divided between making a Swaledale cheese in the kitchen, and turning the sweetcorn bed into the overwintering brassica bed in the tunnel. With the usual daily chores thrown in for good measure.

It is 4pm as I write this. 

This morning's fresh milk has been warmed, rennet added, and the curds have set and now been cut. They are resting for an hour, before being strained through cheese cloth and left to drip overnight.

The bed in the tunnel is currently being watered thoroughly, having been forked over (the only way to get the sweetcorn roots out, and the inevitable couch grass roots), divested of five large buckets of soil - which were replaced with the same amount of compost from the newly-opened bin - and scattered with fertiliser pellets (an organic mix of chicken and sheep manure and worm casts). 

The sun is on the tunnel now heating it to over 30C until about 7.30pm, which is well past my knock-off time, so the brassicas will be planted out in the morning when it's cool. They really do not like being transplanted in hot conditions.

The newly-opened compost is a good friable mixture. Opening it signals watering and then covering up the bin I've been filling for the past 12 months (with a sheet of heavy duty black plastic). 

Any new compost now goes into the third - and empty - bin. I mowed all the sweetcorn plants and roots into shreds just now, and they have started the process in that next bin. 

And so the cycle continues: one bin filling, one breaking down for a year, one gradually being emptied onto the beds.

When Bean wasn't hunting bunnies she was doing the sunshine shuffle supervising.

A good day.