Nothing much happened around here lately....

We have been quietly working in the garden and around the house and barn and Sue foolishly said that nothing exciting had happened for the blog lately!

Today started off mistly but gradually cleared and warmed up so that this afternoon it became quite hot. Sue had been scrubbling in the shrubs, growing weeds and last year's dead leaves as she was determined to reach the end of the line of trees along the top of our back field. She has done a brilliant job, and we've recovered a strip of land about 2 metres wide.
I thought that Sue deserved a cool drink for her efforts and just as I was taking it out to her, my way out to the back field was blocked by a metre long snake! Some of you might know that Sue is very frightened of snakes, so I called to her to ask her if she wanted to see the snake. Despite the psychological fear of snakes ( we won't go down the route of Freudian explanations), Sue is interested in Nature and so came to see our snake trying to warm himself up in the sun. Our neighbours assure us that these coloured snakes are not venomous ( it's the black ones you've got to look out for!) but it is still not easy to feel relaxed about a reasonable sized snake lying on the lawn. I eventually decided that I ought to encourage him to move off, so, with a very long piece of wood, I tried to move him on. I got the stick underneath the snake about one third of the way down his length when he decided enough is enough and he disappeared into a hole in our stone wall in a flash.

We are now approaching areas of piled up stones or wood or any old vegetation with some circumspection.

I'm pleased to report that I've dug one third of the beds in the vegetable garden and I've dug one length of bed for the cordon Apples. We even went on Saturday to our local town for the Saturday market and bought some lettuces to go in one of the beds. We are going to Paris next week for Sue's 60th birthday and so we didn't buy more vegetable plants; we'll get them when we return. It will be interesting to see if we get any problems from the local wildlife (boars, deer, hares?)