I’m still behind on blogging about what we’ve been up to, as always, and I’ll get round to telling you about our wonderful holiday in Wales eventually, but first I want to share a lovely afternoon we had with our friends from 3 Kids and a Gluestick about two weeks ago.  After a morning at the swimming pool, we set off to meet them at Claremont Landscape Garden.

We met up with our friends and had a picnic by the lake.  The children had a lovely time, though we had to work quite hard to stop them feeding their lunch to the ducks!

After lunch, they rolled down a really big hill – this is one of their favourite things on the National Trust #50things list so I think they will be doing it at every opportunity from now on.

We weren’t there for very long, but there was time to play in the dirt, watch the ducks – and a heron – and go for a short walk round the lake.

The children climbed trees, the dads chatted (and carried stuff) and the mums took photographs!  After finishing our walk, we left Claremont and drove for five minutes to our next stop, Garsons Pick Your Own Farm.

First we picked carrots, beetroot, onions and cabbages.

Then we managed to find just enough brambles that were ripe enough to pick.

Next we picked some sweetcorn which was an interesting learning experience.  We were very glad to have our friends with us to prevent us from picking and buying unripe sweetcorn.  It wasn’t as easy as the sign made it sound!

And finally we picked enough strawberries to eat some that night and make the rest into jam.  Daddy made the jam the next day, and it is delicious.  We’ve been meaning to go to both Claremont and Garsons for a long time, and we had such a good time that I’m sure we’ll be going back again very soon.