Dull, dull, dull

Even for here it's been a quiet week.

The weather did come in from the west and we had thunder. Quite stirring. For a while. Since then it's been rainy and cold and most of my seeds are still reluctant to germinate. I keep looking, hopefully, but there's only so much peering at the earth a girl can do while dodging the raindrops....

What else? We've had a ewe with a limp, a sickly lamb and tonight I saw a squashed pheasant. The Thomas's have turned some more cattle out and Carl has wormed some more sheep. The blackthorn has finished and the hawthorn is just coming into flower. Everywhere is amazingly green. The lanes are lined with cow parsley, campion and stitchwort - and bluebells too - bowed down this evening by the wind and rain. (Bluebells are a sign of old woodland I believe.) At the site of the road/waterworks at the top of the lane earlier this year a solitary orchid has managed to survive against the odds.

Our barn is surrounded by nesting birds; redstarts and great tits in the hovel wall, wagtails in old pig sty, swallows in the silo, blasted pigeons in the owl box, sparrows in the sparrow terrace, a wren in the log pile, blue tits in the blue tit boxes.... and these are the birds we've noticed. There must be a curlew up on the field to the east as we hear its eery cry quite frequently.

See what I mean? Hardly the stuff of headlines but the little things which make the backdrop to the bigger picture and without which we'd be a whole lot poorer.