Can we have spring now please.

Sun was out again today, and it topped 10C by 9 o'clock.  It really feels like Spring is on the way. I wish anyway.

Brendan had a project all of his own today.  He had to fix a rake, in fact his favourite rake. 

The question is - how did he break it? 

Well, he broke it over Ernie's back when the naughty sheep was trying to mount my neighbour's elderly visitor. The rake just bounced off Ernie's fleece and cracked the handle.  Before you say anything this sounds much more violent that it actually was.

The trouble was always to attract Ernie's attention once he had fixated on someone, and bouncing things off him seemed to do the trick - watercans, footballs, a pumpkin, shoes and a rake all did service.  The trouble was that people would look at him and think ahhhh cute sheep, and he would just dominate them, and they, rather than giving him a quick smack on the nose to get him to back off would allow him to have his way with them until they came perilously close to losing their feet.  By the time he went in the freezer in December he was certainly not a cute lamb - but an enormous well fed German Shepherd sized sheep.

With Bren occupied with the rake stave, that left last year's coldframes to be sorted out, a quick check over, some taping of the corners and replacing of some screws and then some discussion over the best way to weigh them down. 

We have very strong winds throughout March and everything needs to be weighted down to survive, the polytunnels and the coldframes in the garden, the shutters have tobe locked down and the washing has to be double pegged otherwise it vanishes. 

We actually had a second polytunnel in the garden, one of those poly tent looking things stretched over thin aluminium poles, and one weekend we went out and came home to find that it had vanished.  A little tornado had formed, run along the valley and picked up the tent and deposited it in the ash trees, leaving the seedling trays and table exactly where they were, complete untouched.