Giant Mole Hills? Buried Sheep?

I had a heart stopping moment when I stepped down from the shed with the corn for the chickens the other morning.   The piles of earth deposited by Lovely Hubby with his tractor shovel looked just like row upon row of graves ... and they are just about sheep sized!!  I had visions of the coach loads of tourists that go past each day wondering what the hell we were burying just over the hedge from the road, then seeing the half dozen sheep in the end field and putting two and two together!!

If the police get tipped off and call round luckily all they will find under the ground is one very worried mole who has been leaving his mole hills all over this same spot for the last couple of months.

Now when his fresh mole hills appear they are on top of Lovely Hubby giant mole hills.

This is the start of the re-landscaping work that Lovely Hubby is doing between the house and Chicken World.  Once the ground is levelled nicely it will be seeded with new grass and a permanent fence will be put in place between the shed and the hedge, which will also run the entire length of the inside of the hedge in Chicken World to the pointed corner edge of our land.

So it's all go here again at the moment and the building work starts on the house tomorrow to repair the damage caused by the heavy rains of Winter.  It seems to never end ... oh well back to brewing cups of tea six times a day :-/

Sue xx

The Pretty .... and the Not So Pretty

I stopped for a break between planting row upon row of little Spring Onion seedlings earlier on this afternoon, sitting on the patio in the blazing sunshine is so much cooler than working in the polytunnel and this little 'weed' caught my eye.

Isn't it just so delicate and with such a lovely combination of colours.  I have no idea what it is but in my eyes it is the most perfect little flower I have seen in a long time :-)

Not quite as pretty to look at but also a thing of beauty to me is this old chest.  We found it when we were emptying Mum and Dad's garage of Dad's hoard of old things.  Buried deep amongst all the other 'treasures' it was full of bits of junk, I couldn't see it thrown in the skip when it had obviously meant something to Dad, so it's been languishing in one shed after another of ours for the last couple of years.  I suddenly had the urge to finally do something with it.

As you can see it's made out of really old and rough offcuts of wood, the sort of thing a woodworker would knock together to hold his bits and pieces, rather than a chest fit to grace the best rooms of a house.

Rather coincidentally it has exactly the same handles as the old drawer I use to keep all my seed stash.

My seed drawer, bought from a car boot sale for £1 off an old guy who was selling tools that were in it .... he was amazed I wanted it, but I thought it was just lovely.

Inside it has the same little ledge on one side that you find in many old blanket boxes.

A neat little touch I thought to make something so rough and ready in the style of fashionable blanket boxes of the time.

I have just started on it's renovation, unfortunately due to the miss match of the wood and the state of it, I can't just sand it down and keep it in a natural state so it will be painted.  And as the handles, hinges and catch are so firmly attached with old completely rusted up screws they will have to be dealt with in situ.

I'll let you see it when it's finished  :-)

Sue xx

Glued to the Box

I was catching up with some recorded viewing on the television last night, a lovely programme called Addicted to Sheep.  

Suky and Mavis both love to watch television and can see what is going on with no problem, Rosy can't 'see' the picture but does react to the sounds as they happen and gets a bit agitated when the other two are reacting to things that she simply can't see. It's not an eyesight thing it's simply an inability to comprehend the flat image which most animals have.  

But of them all it's Mavis that has the real affinity with sheep, having lived with a family that were sheep farmers for the first couple of years of her life, so whenever they come on the television she watches even more intently than usual.

After realising that the programme was going to go on and on, she came and joined me on the sofa.

And stayed there .....

... for the full hour of the programme, apart from when she briefly jumped off to get a closer look at some lambs, before rejoining me back on the sofa until the programme ended.

She even looked at me when it was over as if to say 'that was good Mum'.

Sue xx

A Weekend of Weeding

Yesterday on the post about the guys coming and fixing the road sign you may have spotted the newly weeded and planted up flower bed on the inside of our driveway fence.  

Lovely Hubby worked his socks off over the Bank Holiday weekend finishing off what I had barely made a dent in.  It was heavy going with long grass growing after us scattering it last year on a breezy day, as well as lots of deep rooted and flourishing weeds.

To give you an idea of what it looked like I have dug out this photo taken in early April, so you can imagine what another month of Welsh rain and intermittent sunshine had done to it, it was about to set seed again and if it was a bigger space a combine would have had a good bale of hay!

Now it's looking good from every angle and once the plants fill out a bit and start to flower it should look lovely.  All these plants have been taken from the pots and tubs from the back of the house, and the lavenders and other things that I grew from plug plants bought last year that over-wintered in the net tunnel.

And with the bark chippings now in place, any weeds that dare to show their faces will be dealt with very quickly.  We don't intend to have to go through all that hard labour again!!

Now I only have to avert my eyes from the bed in front of the house  ;-)

Sue xx

The Sign is Mended

I mentioned the other day that the sign on our grass verge was down, well just an hour or so ago this little highways truck pulled in and the guys set too fixing the sign back in place.

When it came down Lovely Hubby found the fixings in the grass and attached them back on to the sign and stood it against the post, but the sheer weight of it meant that he couldn't get it back up on his own, it really was a two man job.

The grass cutters were out in force last week trimming the edge of all the verges between Glan Conwy and  Llanrwst, they did ours trimming the edge of the verge and all around the sign and then they loaded the sign into the back of their wagon and took it away with them.  Obviously different departments are responsible for mowing grass and fixing up signs (madness that costs us all money, but no doubt due to health and safety and 'jobsworth' reasons).

Anyway within five minutes of them arriving and setting out their traffic cones the sign was back in place and they were gone.  

Back to normal then.

Of course the drivers will continue to totally ignore the sign as they do the one on the other side of the road before the bend, and continue to come pelting round the corner, overtaking each other and sounding horns at all and sundry  :-(

It's not as peaceful here as these photographs would suggest!!

Sue xx 

Tomatoes LOTS of Tomatoes .... Potentially

Today is seeing me a drippy, sweaty mess in the polytunnel, working at 30 degree temperatures to pot on my tomato seedlings and put the larger ones into their final resting place in the Gro-Pots.

I've just started on the 'Gardener's Delight' Tomato seedlings.

And I really wanted to show those of you who are a bit dismayed at the lack of growth on your tomatoes compared to the plants you are seeing in the shops that all is not lost.  I have lots of tiny little seedlings that are only just going into their first sized pots after being started off in toilet roll inners.

The variable weather and chilly nights in the polytunnel has kept the growth checked but they will soon pick up now that we have had a few days of sunshine, even though they do look so ridiculously teeny, tiny now they are potted on individually.

These are just some of my 'Golden Sunrise' tomatoes.  I grew these last year and the flavour is amazing ... and they won me a couple of prizes at the two flower shows I entered with them.

This year instead of staking them I am going back to my 'greenhouse' method of allowing them to grow up strings that I have tied to the polytunnel cross frame bar.  They will need tying in a little bit as they wind their way around the string but it means that there is no mass of bamboo canes cluttering up the polytunnel.  We'll see if it works as well en-masse as it did in a single row in the greenhouse.

I have to admit to sowing far too many tomato seeds once again, and there are lots more plants waiting to be planted.  Some of them will be going in the net tunnel when I have hardened them off slightly,  and some if they put on good growth in the next month will be taken to the car boot sale with us to make some extra cash.

Oh well this has been a nice little computer break ... but now it's back to work.

Hope the sun is shining for you today too.

Sue xx

Using The Back Catalogue

The very first photo that appeared on this blog.

When I find a blog that really appeals to me, and I mean really appeals to me, I have been known to go right back to the beginning and read the whole back catalogue.  I find it helps you to learn more about the writer and the reason behind the blog.  Sometimes it's much more interesting than a book, of course like a book there is also the bonus of being able to dip into it when you have time to spare and read forward a few posts (chapters) at a time.

There have been a few people reading their way through from when we originally began our change of lifestyle over the past few weeks, and I have been able to follow their progress on my Statistics page.  Congratulations to the two of you who have just arrived in the present day  :-)

I myself have just spent the last few days starting from scratch with one of the blogs on my sidebar .... and very good reading it was too.  The blog I am talking about is Remembering the Old Ways.  Michelle has a lovely way of living and I simply fell in love with her beautiful cottage.

I've been asked recently how do you get back to the beginning of someone's blog .... well it's really simple.  I'll use my blog as an example, some blogs differ slightly but most will have archives and be similar to use. 

Look for BLOG ARCHIVES on the sidebar.  

First you will see a list of years, go to the oldest (in my case it was 2009)  click on the dark arrow to the left of that year and a drop down list will appear showing the months.

Click on the arrow pointing to the oldest month and another drop down list will appear with the names of all the posts in that particular month.  

You start by going to the very oldest and click on that particular post.  Once you have read this  post at the very bottom, below the comments in my case,  it will say 'Newer Post'  clicking on this will take you to the next post in the sequence and so on and so on.

When I am reading my way through a blog from start to present day I keep a post-it  note in my diary and make a note of where I finish each reading session, so I can click back the next time I want to read on a bit further.  Be warned however ... this is very addictive .... as I have just found out with Michelle's lovely blog  ;-)

Sue xx