Peony preview

At last the sun is shining on the tree peonies and their red leaves are unfurling to reveal tight buds still wrapped up warm against these bitter winds. We have three decent sized trees - the lovely dark coloured delavayi, a white one and this gorgeous creature below which was also supposed to be white. It arrived as a present years ago and was so small that for the first few years it was trodden on, then when it got bigger it was accidentally strimmed, then finally, surrounded by wire in its own gated community we waited for it to unfurl its brilliant white flowers only to find it was pink. But what a pink! They don't cut well unfortunately, but even for a day - to bring one of the blooms inside and sit and admire it -is worth it.

Got the horses up today. Completely out of hay now and with no sign of the grass growing I am having to feed them haylage - an expensive sort of shrink wrapped hay which is the equivalent of them eating caviare.

so where is this haylage stuff?

Harry and Trude

 The trouble with nothing growing is that the deer are very obvious now. They roam like hungry wildebeest across the fields which look as if they are suffering from desertification(see earlier post) but in fact are just keeping a lid on those rape seeds. Personally I wouldn't mind if the lid stayed shut - that rape is very overpowering. Once our farmer had a contract with a pharmaceutical company and grew opium poppies. The fields looked amazing - all pink and we nicknamed our farmer Farmer Ceutical.

Beezle and Pixie on deer watch

 Anyway Beezle spotted some deer on our morning walk and shot off after them and went miles. Normally he comes back with cut paws from running across the flints but fortunately he was unscarred this time and had to tell Pixie all about it. Pixie had been smelling something interesting at the time and I had managed to grab hold of her - otherwise she'd have gone too and there would have been big TROUBLE.
Came back and potted on the black cornflowers - forty healthy looking plants that I hope are going to grow into this!

 Meanwhile back inside Pixie is getting bored with Beezle's detailed description of chasing the biggest deer you've ever seen ......

 And finds escape in a little light reading.