A short stroll with the hounds

Yesterday I took Sybil and her friend Meg, a yellow Labrador, for a good walk around Scholes and Keppel's Field. We do this walk fairly often, but yesterday I decided to take my camera as there are usually a few interesting birds around.

It wasn't a great day for photography as it turned out as it was rather overcast, but we still enjoyed the walk. We headed up across the fields and into Scholes' Wood, where Sybil chased her usual squirrels and Meg trotted along rather faithfully by my side.

Pine cone in Scholes' Wood

Leaving the woods, we walked alongside the cow enclosure. There have been several cows, the Highland breed I think, on Keppel's Field for quite a while now. They don't cause any trouble, but at first I was a bit peeved that they take up a good portion of the field. There are several footpaths running through the cow enclosure, but we never venture inside unless the cows have been moved elsewhere.

The Head Honcho

Breakfast time

I also spotted the kestrel in with the cows. With the long grass, Keppel's Field must make a fantastic territory for a pair of kestrels, and I certainly see at least one bird everytime I'm here, either perched in a tree or hovering low over the grass. This time, it was a female:

A rather bad kestrel photo

Then the dogs did some posing. Meet my friend Meg, and of course you all know Sybil.

Meg

Sybil

Meg proving she can move just as fast as Sybil:

Labrador attack!

And we found a bit of snow to play in.

We went back down the other side of the large field, and met up with our kestrel again.

Another shockingly bad couple of kestrel photos.

I stalked the bird for a good twenty minutes, trying to get close enough for a decent photo of her hovering. However, everytime I set my tripod up and zoomed in, she would wheel away and carry on hunting even further out of shot. These are the best photos I could manage. It is now my mission to get a decent photo of her, even with my limited camera skills. Watch this space!

A random photo of grass poking through the ice

And a rather surprised-looking Sybil.

See you soon :)

Plot 23

I'm back again, with another update on my allotment plot. Life has been getting in the way of time spent down on my plot, so I've been doing my best to squeeze in the odd hour here and there. Hopefully, now the nights are retreating as spring draws close, I will be able to get a huge move on and start planting some seeds.

Greenhouse

I've been tidying the greenhouse. Not so much as you can tell from this picture, but the inside has gone from plain chaos to organised chaos, which is how I usually bumble through life. I managed to get two cotoneaster plants from Morrisons priced at just £1.50 each, so they are ready to go outside once I figure out where they are going. Most of the missing panes in the greenhouse are now replaced, so it will be a good place for my tomatoes in the summer.

Digging and weeding

I've started doing a little bit of digging. The ground is a bit too wet at the moment for this job to be pleasurable in any way, but it needs to be done. I've dug up several of what I think were rhubarb plants; it seemed the roots had rotted anyway, so they were probably no good, but I'm not particularly keen on rhubarb anyway so I have made way for vegetables I will actually eat. The dog food bag comes in handy for filling with weed roots and taking them up to the fire hut to be burned.

That's the stuff!

There are two piles of compost, all nice and ready to be thrown in the veg beds. I've emptied one of the piles, filling another dog food bag and lugging it up to the greenhouse to shake over the beds in there. The soil was really dusty and no use at all, but now with a good load of compost mixed in, my tomatoes will hopefully thrive.

You can see the difference in the quality of the soil in the above picture. The grey soil underneath would have been exhausted of nutrients and I would have struggled to grow anything at all in that.

The next job...

The picture above shows one of the next jobs to be tackled. Behind the greenhouse is a homemade shed, currently full of rubbish and scary cobwebs. The brambles on the land here need chopping down and the grass tidying up; perhaps in the future I will have a few hens on this area. I could modify the shed into a henhouse, with perches and a nestbox, and the land is a good size to section off for them. Just hope there aren't many foxes that visit the site...