The promised pics

Here are the photographs of our garden in December and  over Christmas. The first photos are of the garden and the vegetable patch, still fairly colourful even in the depths of winter.

 

 I've also included the new chicken roof. The original one, coated in roof seal to protect it from the weather, was slowly chewed by wasps over the last two summers. Wasps chew it up and pulp it and they'd had a good go at the roof so it was leaking water in places. This is no good for the chickens, they need a secure, well ventilated but draught and waterproof lodgings so Luke replaced the old marine ply roof  with a new piece and coated it with roofing felt to protect it further. (the white flash you can see in the house is red spider mite repellent powder). The gritty roofing felt should keep the pesky wasps away!

We also had a mishap with the greenhouse when the door, not securely shut, blew open in windy weather and smashed two panes of glass, the photograph of the horizontal bit really looks like an accident waiting to happen, I think.

Our Christmas walk to the beach took in some pretty hedgerows; here some lichen covered branch looks as old as time itself whilst the pink buds (I don't know what they are) lend a cheery note.

Ending with a little finch feeding on the peanuts.

Un-deck the halls

Is un-deck a word? Almost certainly not but you get the gist. Yesterday saw me taking down the decorations, a huge task which took two whole hours and saw a small glass bauble become a casualty of war between me and the tree. As we had visited my Mum for Christmas this year (it was aborted due to the snow last year) we stopped off on the way and found, to our delight, cheap Christmas trees on Christmas eve. We purchased one for £2.00 (just over $3) which - though impressive -  was one hundred and ninety nine pence more than we paid for last year's tree (a steal at a mere penny due to the abundance of left over trees, again because of the snow). We had paid over a hundred pounds for our artificial one this year though but the shop keeper told me that over ten years it would pay for itself. Hrmm! Anyway, it's all tucked away again till next year and the house is looking scarily tidy and very empty. So I turned my sights onto cleaning the deck before the rain set in (it's currently thundering down onto the conservatory roof and making a real racket). I brought in two big baskets of logs and prepared the next load, shook out some coal into the coal scuttle and got the yard brush out to work away the moss that falls in clods from our tiled rook. The hens have been out most of the day, eating the baby plum tomatoes I threw to them, polished off with a couple of grapes (which they love) and after a nice dust bath in the greenhouse they took shelter from the heavy rain in their house again, who can blame them?
We took a few photos on our walk on Christmas day which I'm waiting for Luke to upload so I can add them to the post; nothing special, just some lichen on brambles, that sort of thing. We've had frost forecast for later in the week but for now we see in 2012 in a soggy manner. Luke has just come back in from turning over the compost and discovering a hole that the rat/s have made in it. Hopefully with this rain to soak it all they may find it less hospitable but I think I'm being over optimistic and my Pollyanna attitude (hoping the rat will hop off to somewhere else without us having to finish him off). Then again, you never know........