Pick Your Own

Last week (on Thursday to be precise) I visited West Green Fruits, this is a pick-your-own (PYO) in Hartely Wintney (North Hants) near where my in-laws live (I've been helping them move house, so I was down there for a week or so). Anyway, West Green is owned and operated by the parents of a friend of mine and so a bunch of us converged on the PYO on Thursday.

This was my first visit to West Green, and I was really impressed. It's HUGE! And the selection of fruits available was phenomenal. I don't have any pictures, I was too busy picking to snap any, but check out their Facebook Page for pics, updates and loads more! I took David, my father-in-law, along with me and together we managed to pick a punnet of Tayberries, another punnet of a mixed variety of hybrid berries (crosses between raspberries and blackberries) and a punnet of strawberries. I ate a fair few as I picked, they were all so tasty. In fact the whole place smelled of ripe strawberries, and let me tell you, they tasted of heaven. 

I also helped some friends pick raspberries and we went through the grass and barley mazes with our smaller friends Josh and Charlie. Prices were really good, around £4.80 a kilo (my two punnets cost me around £8.50) and the fruit quality was top notch.

So if you live in the Hampshire/Berkshire/Surrey area and are looking for some brill fruit, check out West Green Fruits!

I've also turned my strawberries and Tayberries into jam (along with some gooseberries that I got from my in-laws back garden) so posts to come all about that!

Rubbish to Riches: My Bedroom Mirror

My in-laws are moving/downsizing and as hubby has been away from home a lot this summer on research trips/conferences for his degree, I've spent a lot of time with them clearing out the cupboards. I've 'inherited' some brilliant stuff (a full china tea set and espresso set, a cake stand, a bunch of books and movies) and I've spent a lot of time helping them get rid of junk. Junk means trips to the tip (that's the garbage/recycling center for you Americans out there). And a couple weeks ago I went with my father in law to the tip to get rid of some junk from the shed in the garden.

The before shot. I got a bit excited about painting
and forgot to take a picture of it before I started.

Now the tip where my in-laws go has a little shed for unloved items that might still be useful, let's call it the 'one man's trash is another man's treasure' shed. And there, amongst worn picture frames, sofa's from the 60's and a couple retro looking sideboards, I found this mirror. Now we've needed a large mirror in our house for a while, I've not been able to see a full outfit on myself for almost a year now; we left the full length we used to have in Lancaster, I did a really good job putting it on the wall and decided that getting it off again was not worth the £10 it had cost me at Ikea. Anyway, no mirror means some dodgy outfits and also no way of seeing if I look fat or not. Result, lots of chubby pictures of myself floating around Facebook.

So this mirror came into my life, I saw it, I recalled my need for a large mirror in our bedroom, I realised that I had forgotten to bring my wallet (who brings a wallet to the tip right?). I consulted my Father-in-law and asked if he could spot me a couple quid for this mirror, he checked his wallet, £1.50 and a handful of euros (he'd just gotten back from a trip to France). We went in search of the tip man to do some haggling, he said he wanted £3 for it, we said we only had £1.50, but we had a bunch of Euros. We offered him 6 euros for it, and somehow, magically, he agreed! The mirror was mine!

Finished mirror, hung up in the bedroom.

Now what do do about the hideous purple colour (which it became clear was also not the original colour, it appears to have at one time been faux oak or beech, but may have at some point been painted a goldenrod colour and originally may have been metallic, I really don't know, I didn't dig that deep. I didn't have a ton of cash to spend on this thing, I was sort of in trouble for getting it in the first place. But last weekend my husband very kindly agreed to drop into the hardware store so I could purchase some paint and a brush to carry out my mirror makeover. I decided on a paint sample in the teal colour that we seem to like so much at our house. This cost me a whopping £1.10! I originally had opted for spray paint, but man that stuff is expensive! And I bought a paintbrush for around £3.50. That and the current exchange rate on Euros means the whole thing came in at under £10!

I got home, dismantled the frame from the mirror and took it outside. It took two coats of the paint to cover over the purple, but as it's a heatwave in England right now, it dried in under and hour. While the paint was drying I gave the mirror a good clean, removed the remnants of dried on purple paint (whoever had DIY'd it previously hadn't bothered to remove the mirror from the frame first), and gave it a good wipe down with window cleaner. reassembled the frame, moved the brackets around on the back so i could hang it vertically, and with a nail in the wall voilà!  Fantastic mirror for less than a tenner that looks like £50. Just goes to show, you never know what you can find at the tip... or something like that.