Thankfully, the weather seems to be improving slightly and we’ve finally managed to get out in the garden and catch up with chores which have been impossible to do. Needless to say after three weeks of heavy rain and gale force wind, there’s a lot to be done. Kevin managed to trim the hedges and mow the excessively ‘lush’ grass which made everything look instantly smarter.
There's spinach and beetroot in there somewhere!
My heart sank into my wellies on pulling back my anti-pest-of-all-varieties netting in the veg plots. Although the atrocious conditions have seriously affected vegetable growth, don’t you worry, those weeds are looking just fine! It would seem that they’ve also been infected with the murderous tendencies of our ‘friend’ the crow, trying their very best to choke the life out of my young, less aggressive vegetable plants. Painstaking weeding by hand, trying hard not to pull up young plants too, resulted in difficulty in trying to stand upright again but a rewardingly tidy veg plot!
Although weeds are a continuous garden problem, there’s a more serious, permanent problem here at Garybuie. The Laburnum tree in the front garden has a seriously split trunk and unfortunately the individual boughs are becoming top heavy and breaking away from the main trunk. Kevin had to remove one large bough last year as it was gradually approaching ground level. During the last patch of stormy weather, another bough gravitated towards the road, just about car height! Another amputation was called for. Presumably the rest of the boughs will suffer the same fate, it’s just a case of when. Losing the tree will be bad enough but as our house is named ‘Garybuie’ – or more correctly ‘An Garradh Buidhe’ – meaning ‘Yellow Garden’, we suspect that the tree was probably the inspiration for the name. It looks as though we’ll have to be on the look-out for something yellow to replace it. Unfortunately there’s no room for another Laburnum.
Doomed tree?
Anyway, it’s not all doom and gloom here as on Thursday eleven of our third batch of incubated hens’ eggs hatched. It was nice to be able to share the event with two of our guests, John and Sylvia, from Switzerland. At three days old the chicks had more visitors when four young French ladies from Lyon couldn’t resist their charms!
Breakfast surprise!
More visitors for our new arrivals
Tags: chicks, Hatching, vegetables
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