The weather forecast was not so good for Sunday so I went on Saturday. I expected it to be clear and cold but it was actually quite overcast in the morning and surprisingly mild so I ended up quite overdressed and with not really enough water for the day. The clocks have gone back and dusk is around 5pm at the moment so I made what I thought was a fairly early start, although somehow I didn't actually get there until about 10 only to find Ant already hard at work with a good fire going. He's had the last week off work and been at Rais most days and he's been a busy chap! However, I think the odd surprise for when you are back will be nice, so the only picture you can have of what he's been up to is this one.
To start off I finished the strimming in the wayleave now that I have mended the cutting head, including the bank behind the yardarm, where there are lots of tree saplings coming up, and the steps. (Of course I will be buying some new solar lights again after someone hid all the old ones in the long grass!) and raked the wayleave by the dam again.
Then I went to put some feed out for the birds by the Hive. I could see the mouse has been in the paper shreddings in the hive but he has not got to any of the food, but the birds have been busy on my new suet feeder and pecked away all of the side of one hole!
Once that was done I headed over to help Ant for the rest of the day, and we got a good amount done.
At one point as I pulled out a rohdie root I found half a red house brick underneath it!! Which got me thinking, how interesting it would be to be able to look back in time and see how it got there?
After lunch I got the ladder out and went up to clear out the owl box and got quite a surprise. There was no evidence that the stock doves had nested there at all this year, even though I did see them in and out several times, but something has clearly started a nest and quite recently too as the grasses and twigs lining the bottom of the box are still green. So after a quick look to check all was in good shape I left it all alone.
The main stream is still all but dry despite a reasonable amount of rain on a couple of days, I guess the ground water will take a while to recover after such a dry summer, but after some rohdie chopping again in the afternoon I decided to rake the streams which were pretty clogged up with leaves to finish off the day. Once I started though I realised that not only are there still really a lot of leaves on the trees just waiting to fall in my newly cleared stream, but there is barely a trickle in either stream at the moment so I think I was a little premature.
Wandering around I saw quite a few mushrooms again, at a least a couple of which are likely rather poisonous
The clouds had disappeared during the day and the late afternoon sun was coming through the trees as we called it a day at around 4. The days certainly seem a lot shorter all of a sudden.
Sunday
I didn't have much to do Sunday and it was still mild and cloudy but dry so I went up for a couple of hours in the morning to carry on digging up stumps in the gully. I was there just after 9 and two hours was long enough to police the area from the hive to the cars and take out about 10 rhodie shoots that were coming back up and also get 15 smaller stumps removed in the gully, which felt like good progress. Next step will be the really big ones just there though and I doubt they will come out quite as easily as today's ones did.
On the way out I drove up the lane a little way to the wood with the pond and sure enough, it looks like a decent road is going in to access it
