welsh hills again

Well I am beginning to wonder whether I chose the right tree.  I can't say my rowan is doing very much.  All the other trees on Lucy's tree following blog seem to be making a bit more of a stir. There is the very slightest swelling of the buds but this particular tree remains very determinedly bare. At its feet the celandines are shining and the grass is growing. The badger path which runs beside the tree and under the fence into the next field is becoming well worn.  I wonder how many badgers are using it?  I must ask Ian to set up the wildlife camera over night up here so we can see. I am blaming the badgers for the fact that these daffodils have had their tops and flowers nibbled off.  I am not sure if badgers do have a weakness for daffodils and certainly most of ours seem to have survived unscathed but these are right next to the path - perhaps just too much temptation, like a piece of chocolate left on the worktop. There is much new ...

On Saturday two men arrived and knocked all the plaster off our kitchen walls.  I was going to say knocked hell out of my house actually and that is certainly how it felt.  In a four hundred year old  house you never know what you will find when you start to do any work at all.  We have decided to move our kitchen from the 1980s extension where it languishes now, all stained walls and peeling melamine cupboards, to the larger, older room at the front which used to be the dairy.  The room has been plastered with a mixture of lime plaster and new gypsum based plaster.  The new plaster has been gently falling off ever since we arrived and we have bitten the bullet and decided to have the whole room replastered. So here we are, bags and bags of rubbish later, with the plaster off and the old stone walls revealed. The floor is made of huge slabs of slate. The walls are hugely thick too but here and there taking off the plaster has brought pieces of stone gently ...