So. This morning, we had a visit from the Jehovah's Witnesses. I do enjoy a good theological debate (yes, really), so I invited them in. Guess what? They said no. They wanted to talk to my husband.
I don't think their refusal was entirely motivated by misogyny (one of them was a woman...), but it may well have had something to do with the fact that, in their eyes, I was "just a little housewife".
Now. A word to the wise: Don't underestimate the housewife.
She:
- looks after children, and is the one to introduce them to the world. In religious terms, faith is often passed on through the mother - just look at the traditions in Judaism.
- from a political/economic perspective, she is generally responsible for most of the household outgoings - who's writing the shopping lists round here? Oh yes. ME.
- is also a cook-driver-cleaner-teacher-nurse-nanny-painter-interior designer-planner... the list goes on.
I used to think, from time to time, that I was "chickening out" by staying at home and not getting a job outside, pursuing a career, etc etc. I was wrong. It takes a lot to stay at home. There's none of the relief of adult company at work or of being away from the to-do list. You don't get holidays and you don't get sick leave. (What you do get more than outweighs that, but I'm arguing with imaginary Jehovah's Witnesses here, ok?)
So, to get to the point, any housewife is more than worth talking to. Maybe the man is the head of the household - but to paraphrase the mother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, "the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head aaaaany way she wants".
Also, this particular housewife has two masters' degrees and runs her own company. Just sayin', missionaries. Just sayin'.
This time last year, we had a bit of a problem with cherries - our cherry tree was massively productive, we didn't have a freezer and we couldn't even give them away because everyone else in the village had the same problem.
This year, we had a very hard winter and it froze too late for the cherry trees to be happy. Our tree has literally (and I use the word in the full knowledge of its meaning) no cherries on it (well, there were two, but something ate them before they had time to ripen). The neighbours are having the same problem.
The strawberries, however... now that's a different story! We inherited a fairly large strawberry patch when we bought the house, and, despite the slugs' best efforts, we've had 4.7 kilos (just over 10 pounds) of strawberries in five days.
So, what are we doing with all these strawberries?
This should give you an idea... :-)
So. As I mentioned yesterday,
we've been having a bit of an issue with slugs of late. This being the case, we decided to strike back (mwahaha! People/things thinking of stealing our food, BE WARNED).
Obviously, our first choice of weapon would be a hedgehog. We've been doing our best to encourage them - we even have a very hedgehog-friendly heap of old branches under the pine tree at the bottom of the garden - but we don't seem to have had much luck so far. We don't really want to resort to chemicals (we have a small, nearly-crawling person round here who sticks EVERYTHING in her mouth at the moment), so we've adopted another tactic.
The solution? BEER.
We'd heard that slugs liked beer, and there were a couple of half-bottles left over after a barbecue we had on Sunday, so we set a couple of traps - just a couple of inches of beer in the bottom of two jam jars. One went next to the strawberry patch, the other in the herb beds.
On Tuesday morning, we went out to check the traps before breakfast, and there were seventeen (yes, I counted them) slugs in the herb bed trap. The other trap was rather less successful, but the fact that Ze Husband had carried out a MSM (Massive Slug Massacre) operation in that area the night before probably had something to do with it.
We shall emerge victorious! We SHALL!
