I was off to Mexico on Sunday and we had booked the cinema for Saturday afternoon so I went to Rais for a few hours in the morning. it was damp and dull but dry baring a bit of light drizzle once or twice, a big contrast to last week. The bluebells are out in force over the other side of the stream, where the piles of plastic tree protectors were, .
and there was some interesting fungi, which Google suggests is a Jews ear fungus on what I think is an Elder tree.
Over by the Hive the shed has been living up to it's name as the wasps has started a nest in one of the window shutters, it looked abandoned though, with a dead wasp nearby so I quickly removed it. The oak saplings are all looking a bit odd, last week they were all unfurling leaves but this week every single one looks a bit wilted and the leaves have a red tinge. Hopefully this is normal (although the mature tress do not look like this) and not a disease so they will need to be monitored.
I dug up pretty much all of the stumps in the new clearing, just one huge one to go. The couple of really difficult big ones, on the stream banks or mixed in the tress were weedkillered. Two of the piles of stumps got moved to the fire site, another half dozen trips and this section will be done. While I was applying the weed killer to one of the stumps I noticed a big burrow of some kind in the stream bank. there were no obvious tracks, and it is a wet place, but it looked fairly recent and maintained so maybe it is occupied.
I've noticed that although the bracken is sprouting around the hive area there is not a single stem coming up in the wayleave! Maybe we finally have beaten it, or maybe the grass is established enough to keep it under. I'm sure a few will pop up later but at the moment it looks great
