Pictures from the top! Two of the orchard - one of a brilliant flush of bloom after last year's disaster (one apple from 13 half-standard trees) and one of the two rams and 8 ram lambs from 2012 eating down the dock leaves, and doing pretty well. Next shot down - plantlets hardening off on the sheltered table outside the back door before being planted out in open ground - celeriac, sweet corn, tomatoes, brassicas. Next - my lovely front lawn, now a speedwell lawn, looking wonderful after years of hard work doing nothing. And then the veg garden, also after hard work doing nothing, but at least a few veg are now growing there in the Anglo-Saxon primitive patches of clearing amongst the weeds. So much better than last year. There will be home-grown food next winter. Finally, Jack-2013 - he fell down to the hearth from the chimney nest on Monday night / Tuesday morning, quite a well-grown bird, still with me (Friday evening) and in-waiting for when he will be ready to be taken back by his parents to spend the rest of whatever life he has left as a proper wild family jackdaw. He is sitting on my shoulder as I type this. This happens regularly; I know the routine now; when he can fly he will be put in the front yard in a cage, for his parents to find, and when I think they are on the ball I will let him go, to be taken up and taken care of by the family unit. "He" is purely courtesy, I have no idea of its sex!The quantity of green spring growth has taken me utterly by surprise, as always. I have started to get local workers to strim and mow the excess greenery. The best Genetic Modification, I often think, would be to give humans two stomachs, so they could digest grass, of which the world has so much . . . . . I would be sitting pretty, with my multi-species, ancient grasslands, so much more interesting to eat than monoculture rye grass. But it won't happen, and perhaps shouldn't.
