Drought.

Sixteen days, and still no rain, this must be some sort of record, especially for this time of year, the land is now nice and dry and the very cold nights have gone, the grass is growing, buds on trees swelling, but there is no sign of any type of bee. This time last year the bees  were very busy, maybe the cold nights have stopped them from making an appearance, however we do have the dreaded midges around, now those I can well do without.

We have been busy stocking up on wood for next year, we dont have many mature   trees  on our land but we do  have a couple of large ash, one which needed some branches removing, this has now been done by a very able tree man who seemed to have some monkey in his genetic make up, watching him swinging from branches was quite nerve racking, he did a good job and even cut the branches into logs for us.



A good load.

Then we had a visit from one of our neighbours who told us of someone selling  hardwood logs at what we think is a reasonable price, so we rang him up and got a delivery of a trailer  load, he had arranged to be with us at three thirty, five oclock came and no sign, we had to go out and of course, no sooner had we arrived in the village when  we got a  phone call saying he would be with us in five minutes. Fortuantly we had guessed that this would happen and we had left the money for him in our post box, so all worked out well, we were delighted with the wood and will be ordering again.


One of the pleasures of living in the country is being able to leave money out for deliveries, Im not sure if I would be willing to risk it in a town.

Quail eggs.

Once  again we have far too many eggs,  of all types, fortunately our nearest town has a shop that belongs to one of our old customers, he will take as many duck eggs as we can supply, he is trying out the quail eggs. He  will be talking to people that used to buy our Organic eggs, hopefully we will be able to supply them again although we can now  no longer call them Organic  as we are no longer registered, all we can say is that they are produced from hens fed on Organic feed.



An exhausted pup.

Tess still continues to be a delight, she is learning basic commands, but she does not understand that cats have a different type of play, she loves to present them with her toys, expecting them to play with her, she is still surprised by their indifference to these gifts. There is one cat however that does play with her, Emily is a large black elderly cat, she is coming up to thirteen, she loves to hide behind a door and then jump out at Tess, she sometimes takes it a bit futher and jumps onto Tess's back, at least Tess has one cat that understands her.