Try avoiding all the usual tinselly plastic things, glittery and gorgeous as they look and ‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’, as the old song goes.

Amongst the manic last few weeks before the festival I am having to fit in all sorts of other things that just won't wait 'til after it. Picking blackcurrants for one thing, how time-consuming is that? Fiddly little critters. You crouch down in weird positions and get all the arthriticy bits into contortionist shapes and then can't move.

I wonder how many children these days would know how to make a daisy chain, or that holding a buttercup under the chin would show if someone liked butter, or tell the time with dandelion clocks by counting the number of puffs it took to blow the fluffy seeds off?

I've just come back from a week in Yorkshire on a Commercial Fiction course with authors Katie Fforde, Judy Astley and Mike Gayle. We stayed at Lumb Bank, an 18th Century mill owner's house set in 20 acres of steep woodland. It was once the home of Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, so no lack of inspiration there then! The scenery was stunning, the weather sunny & hot and the company brilliant, fifteen ladies and one man.

Morgan's Restaurant in St Davids, where we had the Really Wild Dining Club launch a couple of months ago, had some good airtime on BBC Radio Wales on Tuesday.

I know we are all supposed to have five portions of fruit and veg per day, but right now I seem to be having five portions of just strawberries per day.

I love this time of year. The hedgerow banks are all blousy & full of promise and the countryside looks fresh and green.

We sheared the sheep a couple of weeks ago, fairly early really, and then of course it poured and went chilly so BH’s beloved vintage tractor had to be moved out of the field barn to stay in the rain instead of the sheep. It was only until they acclimatise to having no woolly coats on the weather. So BH is not happy about that.

The ewes all look terrific, not a thin one amongst them, so we must be doing something right.

Gavin and Stacey (the pet lambs) are now off the bottle and outside being small sheep full time. That makes life easier for me, but now we have a loopy lamb that gets her head stuck through the wire fence at least three times a day. We can hear her baaing when she gets caught and are now keeping the wire cutters permanently at the ready in the field barn. She has little horns which prevent her from extracting herself and is obviously a few threads short of a woolly jumper! Despite being in a large clean pasture she finds the attraction of what is on the other side of the fence too much to ignore. We’ve cut so much of the wire to set her free that soon the whole fence will disintegrate.

There’s so much going on this time of year. Planning the festival gives us masses to do and certainly keeps us off the streets, plus we have other irons in the fire (more of this later!) Added to this random chaos are two lambs which think they are people and are on the bottle (as I myself am certain to be before long) plus general sheep and hen duties and so on, and so on!

If you’re a virgin forager and intend to spend some serious time rootling around the hedgerows then there are a few obvious but sensible ‘rules’. Never eat anything that you are unsure of, buy at least one plant identification book with clear photos (not drawings), pick from lane verges where there is little traffic and certainly from above and beyond dog pee level!! Never take all the plants from one area, and never but NEVER dig them up. There are helpful websites with countryside ‘rules’, which also list plants that it is illegal to pick.