Lent lilies and seed sowing – March 2025

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I’m everyone’s darling: the blackbird and the starling

Are shouting about me from blossoming boughs;

For I, the Lent Lily, the Daffy -down- dilly,

Have heard through the country the call to arouse”

Cicley Mary Barker, Flower Fairies of the Spring

Hello Friends,

Greetings from a warm and sunny south west of England! The weather has wonderfully perked up in the last week or so and the constant grey smudge of clouds has given way to blue skies, warm sunshine and a hope filled feel of spring in the air.

We’re half way through Lent, and I feel I’ve not engaged with this season in a way I sometimes do. Above are our selection of Lent devotionals. I’ve been enjoying Wendy Beckett’s “Art of Lent” and realising afresh what a complete novice I am when it comes to solitude and contemplative prayer. It’s been both challenging and inspiring. I also like the contrast between the sermons of Spurgeon, a reformed Baptist of the Calvanist tradition and Delia Smith, a Catholic. Both their words lead me to know Jesus a little better and spur me on me to study his Word more deeply.

This Lent has also revealed another changing season of our family life. For years we have read a devotional together at supper time during Lent and Advent. Sometimes it is a very swift reading and only with those who are present, but this year we’ve hardly opened my carefully chosen book at all. This is mostly due to the fact that the girls have activities on four out of five evenings, so we tend to eat quickly before heading out, and partly due to a good dollop of attitude! However, now one of their big brothers is home for Easter and our holidays begin next week, maybe we will settle into a rhythm of reading together for the next couple of weeks.

I’m really enjoying listening to “Middlemarch”. It’s a bit like a nineteenth century “Neighbours” and I look forward to my daily dose of the lives and loves, entanglements, business dealings and political wrangling of this delightful bunch of country folk. The length of book allows for some great character development and I particularly enjoy the relationship of the two sisters, Dorothea and Celia.

As we’re starting to look towards Holy Week and Easter I hope you all have a very blessed and joy filled season as we celebrate Christ’s glorious resurrection.

With love,

Molly x

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Nature notes and homestead jottings

It’s been another busy month of sowing seeds and not only the polytunnel but also our window sills are overflowing with pots of new seedlings. HWH and our eldest son have been working hard at building three raised beds in the front garden; with food prices continuing to rise, I’m determined to grow as much veg as I can.

We’ve also been given six fertilised eggs from a friend with a cockerel and we are having our first go at hatching in an incubator. Sparkly Eyes is being very diligent about turning them three times a day and checking the water is topped up to keep the humidity constant. I’m hoping we’ll get a few yellow fluffy chicks for Easter…I’ll let you know next month!

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Homeschool journal

This has been another difficult month and I’m very glad term is just about over! I sometimes feel I wear two different hats when I talk with other home educators; the richly rewarding years of pouring into children who are (generally) keen to learn, the fun of outings, projects and friends, the peaceful connection of reading good stories together and the eternally significant task of discipling their growing faith. That might sound a bit misty eyed, but although it was hard work, it was completely worth it and we now have many precious memories as well as strong relationships and solid foundations.

The second “platform” on which I can share is not really a platform at all; it’s a deeply humbling place to be, as I try to navigate additional educational needs and trauma rooted behaviour all mixed in with wildly fluctuating teenage hormones and general poor attitudes (and that last can include mine!). In God alone.

As this is the season I am in now, I thought I’d post a link to something a little more cheery which I wrote a few years ago about how we as a family observe Lent and Easter. Enjoy!

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Musings for our time

Food and how we produce it has been a part of my thinking for years. My grandad was an agriculturalist and from the little I can remember/know of him, he was both insightful and far thinking in this area. I’ve always had a yearning to grow food, slowly meandering from window boxes in the city to where we are now. When we had the opportunity to buy some land, it did seem rather a crazy idea. A hunch that we might need to grow our own food one day fuelled us to the auction room, but as times of plenty continued this seemed less and less likely. I wondered if maybe it was the skills that I needed to develop to pass on to our children…who might have to grow their own food one day. Or maybe I’d got it completely wrong.

We don’t know what the future holds, but prices are certainly increasing and the squeeze on farmers does not make sense. My personal philosophy for food has always been a balanced diet, grown and reared as locally as possible. I’m therefore not keen on the idea of lab grown meat, feeding additives to cows whose milk I consume, ultra processed food or items which comes with many air miles (though my principles in the latter sadly fall when it comes to avocados and bananas). I’m also concerned about taking good farming land away from our farmers, or using it for non food production purposes.

While I’m not wanting to get on any fear driven wagon, I do want to listen to those who grow and produce our food and endeavour to make sensible, practical decisions. I’ve questioned lots of local farmers, both those who are currently farming and those who remember what our communities were like a generation ago. Most of the farms in our small town have been sold for housing; our house is built on what used to be a mushroom farm.

I don’t know what the future holds for the food production in our nation, but it does seem to me that it’s something with which we need to engage. I don’t want to sleep walk into a food crisis if some practical action could avert this. The following links are to YouTube channels I’ve discovered recently. Obviously we need to be discerning, but what I like about each of these is that they are not just complaining or fear mongering but suggesting practical solutions and thus offering a positive way forward. The Bowler Hat Farmer is entertaining to listen to; to my mind he is insightful about where the pressures on farming are coming from and is passionate about what we can do to feed our nation with good, nutritious food. Gareth Wyn Jones has got a great Welsh accent, and didn’t he used to play rugby for Wales? Enjoy listening…I’m off to plant some more seeds!