harvest time at Big Swifty's vineyard

Hello Fans and Followers. From looking on here you might think it's all gone quiet at Big Swifty Towers, but the opposite is true, with blogs slipping down the prioritised list of tasks in hand. We've got news from all fronts, with diabetes stories, lots of paid work, home and garden, Colchester Free festival, and a holiday all taking our attention. So that's five blogs lined up for the near future, confirming the adage about a long wait then several buses come along at once.

We've been making a special effort to change our approach to life, looking at how we can best care for our little family. Following "Radical Homemaking" principles, our priorities have been to go even more natural with food. We have been active on the free food front, which is educational for Frank as part of his Unschooling, and also appeals to me as I'm so cheap. With a couple of pals, Frank and I have been picking wild apples (no, I won't tell you where the trees are) and we've all been busy making apple butter and puree. We have a bumper crop of quinces on the tree in our garden, and yesterday we stripped our vineyard. When I say vineyard, I mean one gnarly twig that looks dead in the spring, but this twisted bit of deadwood has produced about sixty bunches of grapes this summer. Amazing.As we render the grapes down, the house and patio smells sweet. But we'll soon put a stop to that pleasantness. Next year we want to grow more veg, and I've found several sources of free horse poo. I won't tell you where the apple trees are, but I can tell you the source of the horse poo - a horse's a***. Come back soon for more tails of horses, diabetes and slum poetry word play from our own Fred Slattern .............