The young berries never make it to Xmas theses days, the summer season is arriving earlier each year with the heat hanging on longer, so we have taken the nets off the berry canes, rolled them up and put them away for another year. Another job in our seasonal timetable ticked off.

We bought a 100 metre x 9 metres roll of netting 25 years ago. It had a 10 year warranty against ultraviolet sunlight damage. We have got two and a half times its life expectancy out of it, principally because we only expose it to sunlight for a 1/4 of the year. So maybe we will get 40 years out of it? It’s still holding up well and isn’t going brittle yet.

As we eat with the seasons, These days our breakfast fruit salad has turned from Yellow to red. We are picking red berries, red plums, red strawberries and blue berries, with pink peaches from the fridge. The only pale ingredient is a pale banana (that we shamelessly bought from a shop) to soften out the flavour by countering the acidity of the other fruits.

Such is our summer breakfast variety. All these seasonal changes in our diet must play havoc with our alimentary canal biotic floc. Constantly on the change. The only constant in our diet is the lack of red meat and preserved meats. Almost the only time that we seem to eat red meat is when we are invited out to dinner.

We are not vegetarians, we just choose to eat very little meat. Doing so just might be good for us? I don’t know. Certainly, raising so many cattle and sheep isn’t good for the soil or the planet as a whole system. There are too many affluent people consuming too much. We are trying to tread a little bit lighter on our land. At this time of year, in our society  that worships conspicuous consumption, it all gets pretty gross. Consuming less is our gift to everybody for Xmas.

Life is one big experiment. This is ours.