Starting to harvest

[flick]

It's not terribly impressive. A couple of weeks ago, we had similarly-sized crops of broad beans and mange tout, and that's probably it for the broad beans. The peas and french beans have just been destroyed (slugs, bunnies, maybe pigeons too; we netted off all the legumes this year, to keep the muscovies from the peas, but I think we need to re-think that next year to get better slug control), the runner beans are spindly but at least alive.

We have had a couple of courgettes, though, and the courgette and squash plants are just starting to attempt world domination. Lots of green tomatoes in the polytunnel, too, so that's good (and needed: Mike -- whisper it -- used a jar of shop bought passata this week).

More encouragingly, the ducks are continuing to do their job, and we're getting three or four eggs a day (Zu Zu, having laid enough for a clutch, is having a rest while she tries to figure out what happened to it). Our riding instructor has a B&B; when we give her eggs, she always makes a point that they're not going to be for the B&B guests, but we're hatching a plot (ho ho) to possibly sell her eggs for the B&B once the ducklings come into lay.

Speaking of the ducklings:

Middle Duckling has developed a distinct brown patch above her beak, and both she and Pale Duckling seem to be coming through with cream feathers on their bodies (as well as the patch of whatever she was sleeping in: this is a pre-morning bath picture).

Although there are only four baby swallows in this picture, we counted seven (five babies and the parents) flying around this evening as we were putting the boys to bed:


The boys are doing well, although when I rode Benny yesterday and today he was being a bit of an idiot about the wind. It has been very windy here, although nice and sunny with it (except on Wednesday, when we had inexplicable fog for much of the morning). Tomorrow is supposed to be horribly hot, although not as bad as it is on the continent.

Still, the vet came out to give them their 'flu jabs the other day, and to give GB a quick check-up: all good, and she was particularly impressed to hear that he'd managed to rear the day before, but then so were we.

Bob, sadly, has discovered the delights of badger poo. On the plus side, he's an awful lot easier to bathe than Jodie was.

Mike's been busy doing prep work for decorating the bedroom. This seems to involve a lot of trips to B&Q, as well as putting lots of polyfiller on the walls for me to then sand off. I'm sure it makes sense really!

Annoyingly, when we moved one of the chests of drawers I found this:

Some spot checking in the rest of the room, and the other bedrooms, suggests that we've found it before the moths really got established. We were planning to replace the carpet as well at some point, but that's now more of a priority than it was and in the mean time we'll have to keep pulling the chest of drawers out to vacuum underneath. I need to pull all the clothes out and check them, but it's mostly my riding and pilates stuff in there: mostly synthetic fibres, so I'm not too worried.