Month: June 2022
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A tiny forest for a tiny garden
Although a large garden is full of delights, it’s also a lot of work. You notice that kind of thing when you get older. And you wonder, can we ever keep this up? Eventually, perhaps, the answer is no, we can’t. So downsizing from our smallholding in Sparty Lea seems like a compelling option as…
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After the move . . .
I can’t say ‘job done’ yet because it’s not; there’s the small matter of the biosecurity netting, which has the additional advantage of protecting the chicken feed from the jackdaws and pheasants. But that’s a task for this morning, with any luck. Meanwhile, with the chickens ensconced (apparently happily, but really, who knows for chickens?)…
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Chicken moving joys
So yesterday I finally cleared all of February’s hawthorn hedge trimmings from the potato patch, and pulled out this spring’s encroaching nettles. I thought I’d leave the newly sprouting potatoes, emerging from the wanton tubers I’d missed during the past year’s harvest, for the chickens to scratch around. But then I wondered, hmmm, potatoes are…
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The character revealed by what isn’t said
We didn’t stop in to the high mill tower on the bank of the River Nith to view Dumfries through the camera obscura, the other day. But then again, it was closed so we’d not have been able to gain admission anyway. When it re-opens, we shall have to make another, better-timed bus trip to…
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Cuckoo calling and schadenfreude
We clocked several new plants on our pleasant amble through the marshland yesterday. All identified with the iPlant app, beginning with ‘fox and cubs’ and moving on to the pink flowered ‘Endres cranesbill,’ the ‘bush vetch’ and the ‘blister sedge,’ and finishing off with the ‘long-headed poppy.’ The plants were a delight enough for us,…
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The tyranny of history?
We ambled along the same routes that Robert Burns would have taken two hundred and fifty years ago, as we twirled around the town of Dumfries yesterday on our busman’s holiday*. We visited the imposing mausoleum erected some thirty years after his death, that replaced the original simple stone slab marking his burial site. We…
Roads to Joy 