More chores

I know that I posted as little as three days ago, but this week is so busy that most days we do enough to fill an entire post.

Here we are wrapping our apples in tissue paper and putting them away in banana boxes in the food store in the Bunkhouse for winter.  Whether they will survive or not is anybody's guess. I know that Golden Delicious keeps, but the others, I have no idea. I believe the others are Gala, Jonagold, Idared and Starking, so if anybody who reads this and can give some assistance as to which should be eaten now and which can be kept for later, I would be very grateful for the information. :-)

The walnut leaf pick-up and burn is coming to an end thankfully. As we have 8 large walnut trees, that's a hell of a lot of leaves.  Apparently they poison the ground, so they have to be picked up and burnt.

In the meantime we had some planting to do. After the shopping at Tescos on Monday we spotted a really nice florist who was getting ready for the chrisanthemum, aster and heather season mostly associated with All Souls' Day on 2nd November.  So, I bought 4 asters and with the two heathers that were bought some time ago we decided to prettify my parents' grave. It looks quite nice, doesn't it? Unfortunately on All Souls' Day I will be orienteering in some forest somewhere, but we can always light the candles early, can't we?

Yesterday Roy had to  carry on in the garden without me as I got stuck into the Tax Returns.  This was the first time I did them online and it is no bother, no bother at all. A friend, who had always done them online encouraged me by promising that it is really straightforward and with plenty of chances to correct mistakes, and he was right. I have done both, submitted them both and will probably ring them next week about a couple of things that are still not entirely clear to me.  Last time I did that I got a really delightful young woman at the other end of the phone, who was not only helpful and cheerful, but very knowledgable as well. Oh, and I found a big booboo in one of the help boxes that you can get from clicking on a circle with a question mark in. They are usually quite helpful, but this particular one was the only one (as far as I could see) that they failed to update to this year's version, so it was still talking about 2011-12 and 2012-13 instead of 2012-13 and 2013-14. In my feedback I mentioned it and I wonder if they will do anything about it?

I did also watch quite a few TV progs on iPlayer, so I am more or less up to date with myself. It is interesting how we don't watch TV at all in the summer and then autumn comes and all the ones we love are back, so you have to keep on top of them. First it was Downton, now Homeland and hopefully in the not too distant future it will be Sherlock.

The only chore which still awaits is that of cracking walnuts. It is a monotonous job, but can't be avoided if we want to eat walnuts.  We have about 4 large and several small sackfuls of them, so I think I will depart now in search of a wooden hammer and some nuts.