Bedazzled by the sun

A real winter’s day. The perfect sort which was sunny and warm and so beguiling.  I found myself dawdling this morning as it was so much fun just to sit and turn my face up to the sun while I worked.

That and trying to catch Artur’s attention.  That cat. He has days when he is so contrary.

This morning he seemed to delight in sitting just out of my reach. Pretending he was coming over to sit on my lap and then stalking past, head averted and tail swishing like mad.

I gave up after a few of these games, and he settled down to his preferred sport of snoozing. 

It was so warm he actually took up position on the water barrel outside my potting shed.  But he moved in around lunchtime when a breeze blew up and the delights of the wine box with fluffy fleece on my staging bench inside was more tempting.

No time for snoozing for me.  I decided that now I have a proper soft fruit orchard I wanted to rearrange the new climbing berries.  Sorry, I couldn’t think what they are called, but Teo gave me some cuttings from his tayberry, boysenberry (I think) and black raspberry brambles.

I have hammered in some wooden supports right  at the edge of the soft fruit terrace (a handy grab rail in case you get too close to the edge).  And have twisted the long strands of the climbers in the hope they will grow along the horizontal support wire and make picking the fruit easier.

If they fruit. They didn’t last year.

And I took the opportunity to move the kiwai which has sulked as much as Artur this past year.

I’ll be able to nurture it a bit more now that I can find it among the rest of the orchard plants.

After lunch I decided that there was no point moaning about the lack of mulch around the dozens of garden beds. I just had to make more.

So I chipped sticks like mad. I was breaking the ‘no noisy machines on the sabbath’ rule, but all bets are off in this crazy one day sun, one day rain season. I heard a few chainsaws going on the other side of the valley this morning.  So hopefully no one resented my noisy chipping machine.

I tend to pick up fallen sticks every time I go for any walk on the farm. So I had quite a collection. Plus all the prunings from the mulberry tree.

And I was surprised that I managed to cover a good bit of the shade garden (north side) with what was piled up in the parking area.

Naturally this meant that I had to keep going. Buried way down deep on my long list of Repairs to the Farm was – drag branches from lower terraces – so there was no putting it off.  I hauled and hauled and trudged and trudged. I actually finished in the dusk and have two huge piles to get up to the parking area.  I abandonded them half way up the drive. Knackered, and unable to quite see where I was going.

So that’s on the to do list first up tomorrow.  The only tricky thing is I expect it will rain tomorrow.  So I’ll have to a lot of these chores in the pouring rain.

I do have the Clean the Potting Shed task saved up for a really wet day.  And that will give me plenty of opportunity to really annoy Artur who will bitterly resent my intrusion in His Potting Shed. Hah!