Getting stuck in

I'm trying to skim the turf off from one vegetable bed every day. It was another glorious morning when I did my daily penance and we now have 3 beds revealed. Sue hand dug the first bed but we decided that we should try using our 'motobineuse' first to break up the soil before she starts preparing it, picking out stones and then adding compost.

We were pleasantly surprised at the amount of soil that the 'motobineuse' turned up. There are still some stones there but not the amount we had feared, although we still think that we will find other parts of the garden with a lot more. The hardest part of the job was pushing the machine back up the hill; a good cardio-vascular workout.

Spring is pushing on relentlessly; the birds are very busy feeding at our feeding table on the window sill and on the fat-balls. Today we were visited by blue tits, great tits, sparrows, a pair of green finches, a pair of nuthatches; we even had a pair of magpies trying to hang on a fat-ball! In the garden we have black redstarts, chaffinches, and we see woodpeckers and a pair of what Sue thinks are Kestrels who are nesting fairly near as we can hear them calling to each other all day long. Some of the trees are just bursting out into leaf, although the willows have been in leaf for about 3 weeks now. We have been seeing cowslips in all the banks and now we realise that our wildflower meadow, which adjoins somebodies small field, has a profusion of muscari (wild grape hyacinths) which are just making themselves visible in the long grass. We are really looking forward to seeing what other wild flowers come up in the 'meadow'.