Spring?

Recently although it has been cold up here it feels different. There are gorse flowers appearing on more of the bushes by the side of the road, there are more days where the sun has a bit of heat and there are daffodils popping up in the little flower bed by the front door.

It appears that we may have acquired a new neighbour, I won't say pet as he definitely is not domesticated (you'll see what I mean in a minute), but he is here every day. This blackbird is a narcissist through and through and likes nothing more than perching on the window trim of my car and admiring himself in the wing mirror. Naturally the unfortuate result is that he has been leaving 'little gifts' all down the side of the car. The Furry Assassin wants nothing to do with him and has not even tried to bring him down and JR just looks out of the window at things further in the distance. I don't suppose there is any point at all in washing the car seeing as we have been up the woods a great deal. The great thing about having a Rayburn when the boiler decides to take a few days off is that you can still heat the house. When the weather has been a little better my lovely OH and I have been out with our chainsaws cutting the fallen trees into rounds and splitting them. As a result we are both excited to see the clearing appear which was full of wind blown trees and seeing some of the ground cover underneath. We found a little holly tree growing away almost underneath a fallen tree so we took two work 'days' while the munchkins were at school to limb the tree then cut it into rounds without damaging the holly before splitting the wood into neat logs to burn at home.

Narcissistic Blackbird

As the woods are waking up I wonder how many of the wildflower seeds I sowed last year are going to come up but I will have to wait and see. Last year I was baffled to see the sea of blue devil's bit scabius appear until my OH reminded me that I had actually planted it. The honeysuckle is already going green with new leaves although the catkins on the silver birches have barely started to put in an appearance. In a few weeks I will be out again collecting gorse flowers to make more gorse wine. Yesterday I finally got round to bottling last year's batch and we had a little taste of it and it was delicious, far better than any white wine I have ever had but then is there any point comparing a country wine to a grape wine? Our stock of raspberry liqueur has nearly gone so I will be doing all I can to encourage the two stands of wild raspberry growing in the woods and if that means putting a bee hive close to them then I don't see why not. I am prepared with extra equipment, the woven skep a fellow beekeeper gave us for a wedding gift will be used when I catch a swarm. It's all really exciting and in addition to seeing all of the plant life wake up after the Winter I am seeing the bees doing the same. At the weekend we had friends to stay and one of them suited up and joined me as we took a very quick peek in the hive to see if the girls were okay and put some extra fondant on top of the frames. Reading through my bee keeping books is getting me up to speed on what I need to do next and I have plans for the brace comb that the girls made all over the inside of the cover board which I shall tell you about later.

beeswax doodles on the inside of the cover board

I hope you can take time to go for a walk, see some snowdrops, celandines or aconites and maybe listen to a few birds as they go about their business (although hopefully not a blackbird busy going about his business on your car!).

Hugs from Haggis Land,

Jx