Strawberry Season

Spring is now in full flow. Luscious red strawberries gleam temptingly in the sun, attracting the tiny new tortoises who have a quick nibble of each, just to check for ripeness. Next week we’ll have to get commercial and pick for selling, but now the first week of the fruit is for the family to gorge ourselves silly, make strawberry smoothies, scatter them over our cereal at breakfast and lavish them on our guests.

Strawberries will feature heavily on the menu for our Spring Festival on Saturday. I’ll make some pavlovas to receive them, piled generously atop a layer of whipped cream.

Flowers and water are the themes for this festival. We’ll make flower crowns with flowers of tissue paper, pick daisies for the children to make flower gardens in the sand and bring pitchers of water to our circle to give thanks for the life-giving rain. This winter we’ve had plenty. The dams are full for the first time in years, so there is much to be thankful for. Three of our invited friends will be having birthdays on that day too, so we’ll have a birthday tea with a cake each. Two of them are children, so I think they should each have their own cake to blow out candles on and then how could I leave out the thirty-one year-old, just because she’s grown-up? So much baking planned for Friday.

It is also the end of term on Friday, bringing two weeks of holiday before the last term of the school year. This year seems to be accelerating past at an alarming rate!