welsh hills again

Yes, I know.  What happened to day 17?  Read on. We are in Devon looking after our two little granddaughters for a couple of days while son and daughter in law and the new baby have a small break elsewhere.  The girls are delightful, generally amenable (apart from occasional passing bouts of shouting from the two year old!) and we have been left food in the freezer and the usual pre-school sessions in the day, quite a few for the four year old, fewer for the two year old.  So this is probably about as easy as it can be to be responsible for two under fives and two dogs.  One of the dogs is at the vet's as she is not well.  The girls are good eaters and good sleepers.  And yet it is still quite full on and I am sitting on the sofa very near to drifting off to sleep! I had plans before we came of continuing the project by visiting a local and very good garden centre and buying some more plants which would contribute to moving the cutting garden ...

Day 12 is looking like a challenge.  It is misty.  It is cold.  It is dank.  Do I want go outside?  No I do not.  What on earth can I think of that I would like to do and that I have the energy to do? I think today I might make something different count as part of the project and pick daffodils for the house.  After all a garden is for pleasure and part of the pleasure of a cold dank day is to bring armfuls of daffodils into the kitchen. There, and today that is the 100 day project: daffodils and primroses and pulmonaria.

Hens are great heralds of spring.  Although it is still cold enough for the woodburner and the electric blanket every night, the hens are more responsive to the lengthening daylight than the temperature.  We have eight hens and one cockerel.  Throughout the short dark days of November, December and January we get just one or two eggs every couple of days.  It is hard to tell whether they are laid by our rehomed hybrids from the British Hen Welfare Trust or by our own Welsumer crosses as both lay a medium sized pale brown egg, though perhaps the Welsummer eggs are a little darker and more inclined to be speckled.  The Cream Legbars don't lay at all in the winter.  Their eggs are a beautiful pale blue and as the days get longer we check the nesting boxes hoping for the first sight of that pale blue gleam. This one is so pale you can hardly tell it is blue in the picture but I promise you it is.  Now we have all the Cream Legbars laying and eggs com...

There was an awful lot of snow.  When the great fall came we spent two and a half hours digging ourselves out.  And now, nearly two weeks on, there is still quite a bit lying. The wind piled great drifts, as high as the stone pigsties.  The kitchen garden was one great surging sea of snow.  Usually it looks like this, in fact this picture was taken a couple of days before the snow hit. Today it still looks like this. Ian spent hours and hours digging and shovelling and hiking in and out of here over and through the snow to the hens.  They spent the worst of the days confined to their house and then nearly a week with access only to the enclosed run.  On Tuesday Ian and a friend's son dug out the deep drifts which had buried the fencing for the larger run and reinstated it. It's a good job that only the large house at the end is in use at the moment as the two smaller houses which we use for younger birds had filled right up with snow. ...

I give up.  We woke up this morning to a covering of snow, not a heavy one but enough to plunge us back into winter.  It has been cold as cold up here this week and all the signs of spring are stubbornly stuck.  The fat hellebore buds remain resolutely closed.  The primroses, which last year were flowering cheerily alongside the snowdrops, are green and pinched and cold.  The snouts of daffodils squat, frozen into immobility.  Only the snowdrops are flowering in the side garden and along the garden wall. So today I am going to sit by the fire and dream of spring, not the early spring of hellebores and crocuses but the full frontal overflowing of primroses and daffodils and blackthorn and apple blossom. Blackthorn like this against a blue spring sky. Primroses.   Kneel down and smell them.  They are the faint, sweet, green smell of spring.   February Gold daffodils.   Do they bloom for you in February?  Here...