garden party love

I've been meaning to upload these photo's for a couple of weeks, but as usual, I keep getting sidetracked. The other weekend we had a family gathering at 'The Mill', my mother's family home, and still home to my grandmother and mother's brother.
You see the Mill is actually a real, still working flour mill that is in Ponder's End (located in between Enfield and Chingford) on the River Lea. It is the family business and has been for 140 years, and the Mill itself is even mentioned in the Doomsday Book, if you are interested you can read more about it here (if you do read it Ken was my grandfather and David who is in charge now is my uncle.)



You may have seen our bread and cake mixes in you supermarket (Wright's) we also make the own brand flour for Waitrose and Budgens and Warburtons (also a long standing family run business) use our flour to make their bread. If you watched 'The Great British Menu' last year One of the chefs from the South East choose our Sungold Pastry Flour to make shortbread for his dessert.



More than anything the Mill is full of lovely childhood memories for me. Since my mother was a girl there has been a swimming pool there, and I have fond memories of garden parties we had when I was a child, when all us cousins would clamber out of the swimming pool all shivers and goosebumps, wrap up in towels and feast on doorstep sized jam sandwiches made from Mimi's (my grandmother) homemade rasberry jam and freshly baked bread from from the test bakery.





We where lucky with the weather (as alway's with Mimi's garden parties) and it was a beautiful day, as always she took me on a tour round the walled garden



wouldn't it be lovely to have agreen house/potting shed like this...



on the way to vegetable patch, I managed to acquire some beetroot and a recipe for pickling them!



and this the window of a little out building, used buy my mother before and after my birth, as her pottery.



A glimpse of the River Lea, where the Mill would have originally got it's power from.



Finally, on a slighty less picturesque note, it's amazing what can happen after a few glasses of wine, and with the help of a highlighter pen, a uv light and few cousins.