A window into LandWorks

“So we’re all just doing a couple of hours [gardening] in the morning… [we’ve been sanding the worktops too] that is really hard work,  it’s tedious, we did it yesterday three of us and it was alright, we got it done quite quick, and I’ve done most of that one this morning, we’ve got one more to do again tomorrow, one a day, so gardening every morning for a couple of hours until tea break, sanding, making tables, a bit of turning, I did some big bowls, making the cabinets for the café, we’ve made all the cabinets now, they’re all made… picnic benches we’ve been making…

…I keep saying to [my girlfriend] maybe I should sit down and let her son know, because he doesn’t know that I’ve been to prison, she doesn’t want him to know, you know, he’s 12 he doesn’t need to know, but then if he realises that I’ve been to prison, he might end up running round, oh my mum’s with somebody who’s killed somebody, and she doesn’t really want that…  I think it might be a good idea to let him know that I’ve been to prison, and the sort of people I met in prison, and what prison is like and everything… I do speak to him and I do, I say to him, where I work at the moment we have lads that are coming out at 18, 19, that have done all sorts of wrong things, they’ve been to court, and this is like their last port of call really before, you know, if they do anything again they’re off to prison, I’ve said to him, so I do sort of tell him that now and again, but I don’t know if it goes in one ear and out the other ear though…

…and we have made, ooh did I send you pictures of the bird boxes that we made? We have made Blue-tit boxes and Robin boxes… one’s for Blue-tits and one’s for Robins, the Blue-tit boxes have a little housey bit on top with a 30mm hole and that means that other types of tits can’t get in… and they have written on them LandWorks Robin boxes and Blue-tit boxes… the Blue-tit boxes are £12 and the Robin boxes are £8, they’re for sale on the stall… we have sold the Robin boxes, but only the ones that had little Robins engraved on the front, or the ones that say Mr and Mrs Robin… they’ve sold, the plain ones haven’t… so we need to burn that on to the other ones to make them sell… the candle holders, tea lights have gone through the roof again, we’ve sold loads of those in the last week or so, and now we do double tea lights and triple tea light ones and they’re selling as well… we’ve had some long shaped branches so we’ve been able to put two or three (tea lights) in and they’ve sold, the next lot are going out with scented candles, yeah they didn’t have any normal candles, vanilla flavoured ones… the spice racks are not selling… not one, I don’t know why, we’ve got empty spice jars on them for display, they’re £15, I don’t know if that’s too much or not, [they’re] exactly the same as the ones we’ve got in the kitchen, the big bowl hasn’t sold, but I think that’s too expensive as well…”