Birthday Week - What's In Store?

We'll round off our birthday week celebrations with a look at what's in store for the next 12 months.

• I'm looking forward to getting my own bees sometime soon. I'm unlikely to get any honey this year, but if all goes well and they build up enough stores of honey and pollen they'll survive the winter and be ready to go again next spring.


• Harvest 2007 from our new bigger allotment plot. Spuds are new this year, pumpkins, cucumbers, strawberries and soft fruit. I'm dying to see how they turn out.


• I'm keen to add a webcam to the site, either focused on the chickens or the bees.


• I want to be ready for the mushroom season this year so I'll be finding out about courses or talks and investing in a good mushroom book.


• Visiting farms and working and learning on them. The trouble is every weekend on the calendar seems to be filled in already, in between Open University tutorials and choir concerts, June is already totally booked up. Perhaps I should arrange something in July before those weekend get filled in, too. I'll look into that urgently.


• Apart from that, it'll be more of the same. More challenges, more book reviews, more recipes, more reports of what we're doing here in North Cheshire to live the good life and work towards buying a smallholding of our own. We're not fixated on the destination, though. We're enjoying the journey. And even if we ever get our own smallholding, that won't be "the end", it will just be the start of a whole new journey. I'm glad that so many readers want to share the journey with us. I hope you'll stick around.