Bank Holidays and troublesome trees

One of the things I did over the weekend was explore an ancient wood near our house. It's small but enchanting and was filled with wild flowers and the last of the bluebells.  My wild flower meadow is loving the rain  and lots of the seedlings that I sowed are a few inches high now. All the natural grasses have shot right up and thank god the dandelions have flowered and blown away. I didn't count on them being such a pest but I'm dealing with them. 


 I love how everything in the garden is blooming. Except the horse chestnut. I wish with all my heart that it would just shrivel up and die. It is right over our patio and all year long it annoys me. Now it is the white blooms EVERYWHERE and The Stickies. They stick to the dogs, who then pick them off in the front hall way and while they are lying on the sofa. They stick to my feet and then come off in the bathtub and I have to round them up and scoop them out. They blow in when the door is open and then materialise up the stairs. After the stickies it will be the little buds that don't make it into conkers. They are pea size and have spikes that break off in your skin if you step on them barefoot. I have to remove them like splinters from our feet. They come in with the dogs too and then make a racket when I vacuum them up. Then it will be the conkers that bang down all Fall and spook the dogs as they hit things in the garden like the terracotta pots or the picnic table.  They are hard to mow up and then get embedded into the lawn and hide in the flower beds. I pour bucket loads into the river and let nature take care of them there. Then the leaves fall off in November and they are huge. I can't use the leaf blower because they are too heavy and The Rooster is still raking them up at Christmas! Then spring comes and the crows nest in the damn tree. Sticks with bird poo fall everywhere and the noise that the birds make drives me mad. I could have had the tree down as my birthday present but I chose a puppy. What the hell was I thinking!


Saying that, the puppies where born this weekend and in a couple of weeks we can go and have a peek at them and meet the mother, Misty. We are trying to come up with cool name but I think we will have to see her first, then decide. The other dogs have been named after Calvin and Hobbes characters but we have run out of girl names now and we don't really fancy calling a puppy, Mrs Wormwood after Calvin's teacher. 


Suffolk show this week. Nothing like a nice farming day out.