Having carefully reorganised the strings and sticks back to the original 2 bed format, here's the first layer of manure and leaf mould on and tamped down:
And after another 4 barrowloads and another layer...
Doesn't it look yummily like chocolate cake mix? Hopefully the purple sprouting broccoli and cavolo nero will think so too. Bless them, they are currently languishing in the greenhouse desperate for potting on.
I managed to get 2 barrowloads of viridor green waste compost on the far end before bad light stopped play at just after 9pm. But it was definitely too dark to bother with a photo!
The ladies observed my barrowing with interest - it's a good job they were securely the other side of the fence though, or they would have had a heyday with the leaf mould, it was rammed full of delicious looking worms!
So I took pity on them and gave them some corn sweeties...
which they stuffed greedily as if not fed for a month.
3 eggs today! Still pullet sized - Bunty (after 3 noisy attempts to sit for 20 minutes each time, she had practically rearranged the bedding in the whole hen house by the time she'd finished), Queenie, and the last one, unknown, but laid in the little divot of soil around the base of the greengage tree...the first one we've had not in the nesting box (unless you count the shell-less egg found by L being eaten by Bluey by the gate, which we never knew where it had been laid or by who). It's quite a lot paler and whiter looking than the others so possibly could be Delia starting?
I had to retrieve Butterscotch from the hedge 3 times this lunchtime, she was obsessed with flying over the fence and into a particular hole halfway up - I wondered if she was looking for somewhere to lay so each time I caught her and put her in the nesting box. Eventually she did get the idea, and sat there for half an hour in the end - but no egg. Perhaps the one under the tree may have been her? Either way, I'm obviously going to be having a crash course in wing clipping tomorrow - I'm terrified she will go through the hedge and onto the footpath and be taken by a dog.
Another lovely sunny warm day after a dampish start, so I got the dahlias, sweetpeas and summer container plants out for another hardening off day.
I can't believe how many dahlias I have now - all of grandma's rather worryingly rotty looking ones have sprouted merrily, but I have no idea where I will put them all!
The poor sweetpeas are seriously ready to be planted out, their leaves are getting yellow and the greenhouse is getting way too hot for them. If only this ridiculously strong wind would stop, I will plant them out as soon as it's calmer.
I couldn't resist trying to capture the moon rising this evening - so huge and so clear. Full? Not sure, but very nearly, surely. It was a lovely evening x
No comments:
Post a Comment