Something like a bleak (ish) midwinter.

January.. nearly gone already and it's been pretty cold at night, but the sunny days....what a bonus. One of the ponds actually froze over this morning. Bugsy and Scraps were not thrilled about the idea...especially since they hadn't met ice before.

Ok, it melted when the sun got on it, but still....need to check our water pipes from the reservoir to make sure they are well lagged.

We had a fright at the start of the month when Bugsy got caught in an illegal lasso game snare while we were out for a walk to the river. We heard him screaming but it took about 5 minutes to find him half hanging in the undregrowth, luckily only caught by the paw. We had to untie the steel cable from the tree to get him out and his paw was not damaged but we were just so pissed off!

These snares are illegal and the stretch of forest down to the lake is not a hunting zone. We wrote a  poster to put in the local cafe explaining the law and what happened. (but not mentioning that we would like to hang the git who laid the wire by his balls).
Our local trained and licenced hunter Antonio came to see us and promised to walk all the game trails to check for more. He trains hunting dogs around here and hates these snares as much as we do.

Fraser managed to rotavate the veg patch (If there's a Hell it has rotavators) while the frost is still with us most nights which will kill a lot of weeds, yay! Sylvi just needs to do final hoeing and then we are ready for the veg once the frost has gone. Not shown in this photo but we have lined the edges of whole plot with black plastic to stop the rest of the field trying to lay down weeds so that Sylvi doesn't have to worry about the edges.

Right...on the family front
The Month got underway with the birth of a great niece in London on the 4th. Luna May Pilar Sumner is her name and Faye (our niece) is her Mum. We are looking forward to meeting her...eventually!

We felled another 4 diseased pines with Steve and Vanessa, so now there is a LOT of wood stacked up in our bit of forest to be moved over to the wood shed with the Suzy. Still appear to be more dying so watch this space.

It's been a dry month, weather wise and we (I hate to say it) could do with some rain. Having said that, February will now probably bring flooding... Anyway we took advantage of a really nice day a couple of weeks ago to give the dogs and us a bit of seaside time. We all enjoyed it a lot. Eat your hearts out...not another soul on the beach and just a beautiful day

So now, at the end of the month we're pruning anything resembling a tree...burning the brash and clearing round the bases of the fruit trees and mulching like crazy. This includes pollarding the willows - result being shedloads of withies. Here's Sylvi, as ever not wanting to waste a twig, working towards becoming a vagabond basket weaver...basket looks like crap but it does work.

 Meanwhile Fraser has been trying to regain his skill at cartooning, contributing to some on-line galleries like 'illustration friday' http://illustrationfriday.com/ which suggests a new topic every Friday. The results of his efforts can be seen on his drawing blog http://frasers-paintings.blogspot.com/