After an inauspicious start to yesterday – it got out quite nice in the afternoon. Walking around the garden, various flowers are just on the point of bursting out of their buds – particularly narcissi, of which we have hundreds. But there are also primroses unfurling on the bank by the polytunnel where I can see from the leaves that […]
The heron arrived at 7am this morning and was not deterred by either R setting off for town or the post van arriving. He (or she) just sat incredibly still (nothing beats herons for immobility) until suddenly the beak struck out. At first I thought there were fish in the pool after all – but […]
Of course the weather this morning is quite vile – as always on Sundays when it would be great to go for a walk or get some serious gardening done. The Donich is running at full spate and the Goil river just round the corner has burst its banks and is all over the fields. […]
Last week we bought a huge organic salmon from Loch Fyne. I am ashamed to say that I bought it in Glasgow, so it made a journey 50 miles down the road and back (not ideal but could be worse I suppose). Anyway – I filleted it (not very expertly) and it made 10 good […]
I said before we moved that I would give an update on what the data situation is here and how we are managing with the greatly reduced Internet access (compared with what we had before). So what we have ended up with is 2 bonded ADSL lines (this is a service from the Andrews and Arnold […]
The heron we saw the other day seems to be making a pitch for our pond (or minature loch). There are several small islands in the middle, and it is visiting one of them for an hour or two every morning. When it sees us coming it flies off and returns to stalking down the ditch […]
We have a large polytunnel and green house behind the house – a legacy of the previous owners who had a flower growing business here. They are both about 14′ wide by 17′ long – so a pretty substantial size and I am hoping to be able to create some good crops. The idea is […]
Two unexpected (though not necessarily unwelcome) visitors today. Firstly, a heron which we used to see down at the bridge over the river just outside our garden seems to have decided to take over our pond. It stood motionless by the edge of the pool for over an hour this morning – it is out […]
For the last week the Bing Weather app on my phone has been saying that it would snow on Tuesday. On Monday we had two tons of topsoil delivered to populate the new raised beds in the polytunnel. Of course the lorry it arrived in was an 18 ton monster because the delivery firm hadn’t […]
Every lunchtime I make soup. Note I said ‘I’ because cooking isn’t something R does. For the cost of one carton from the chill cabinet in the supermarket you can make an enormous pot which will do at least three sets of lunches for the two of us. Really easy to make and combined with […]
