Pan lid toad

There is an old pan lid on the ground outside the Boggy Brae kitchen window. I put it there to cover the kitchen drain vent to prevent the drain from getting clogged with weeds and grass. I think it is the vent for an additional drain that was added to the house when the kitchen was... what is the expression?... re-modelled some twenty or more years ago. Before that all drainage from the house went a different way and still does.

Yesterday I lifted the lid to check the drain, which I do from time to time, and found a toad.

It was there all day. I took the photograph in the failing evening light. This morning toad has moved on.

Elsewhere in the garden I was enjoying some pinks.

the 'fairy' fuchsia

And here is this morning's north-east sky:

New brush cutter and chanterelles

First go with my new brush cutter in the morning cool. I like it and it will make a big difference to how much I can get done in a given time. The only trouble is that I couldn't start the engine. I had to get Toad to do it. I was thinking maybe I would have to buy a more expensive Stihl machine with an "ergo" starter cord. Then, thinking "what have we missed?", I did a quick google and learnt what we'd missed from this young lad.

We'd missed the whojimmyflippy squeezy button thing (fuel pump priming button?). I've just followed young lad's instructions and the strimmer engine started. Woohoo!

The strimmer came with a single shoulder strap. I've ordered a better two-shoulder harness but in the meantime, thinking about how DerbyshireDaughter tied her babies on her back with a long piece of strong fabric, I reckoned there must be something I could cobble together. I found an old strap (the blue one) that had hook attachments on the ends and, though it looks odd from the front, having a strap over each shoulder and crossed over at the back does spread the weight satisfactorily and comfortably. The only drawback is that the blue strap is a fraction too short if I want the business end of the machine to get closer to the ground. It'll do fine for the tall rough stuff till the harness arrives.






In other news, on Thursday I rang the farmer who has the field next to us on lease about a dead sheep. For the last four weeks or so there has been a flock of sheep, ewes and big lambs, in the field. This has meant I can ease off my attacks on the Himalayan Balsam that was thriving just over the fence and also that the bracken has been trampled down by the farmer's quad bike when he checked the sheep-proof-ness of the fence. We wouldn't mind a few sheep in the garden (they could do some much needed grass and weed munching) but there's no gate into the lane and they could would wander off down to the road.

The dead sheep looked as if something had attacked it by the throat. Big dog on the loose?

I had to tell an adventurous lamb to get back in the field just the other day after I saw it in the lane. I wasn't sure how it would work when I walked towards it along the boggy lane, but it just squeezed under the gate using one of the deep ruts.

Yesterday someone came for the carcass and the rest of the sheep vanished very quickly without my noticing how. The only way this could happen is if they were driven over the broken bridge across the burn at the back. The stream runs parallel to our back fence inside the wood above us and then does a turn down hill where it falls steeply down to the loch along with another burn coming straight down the hill. There is an old bridge made of wooden railway sleepers after the streams join.





The bridge used to be strong enough for a tractor or a herd of cattle but five or six years ago I had to ring the farmer because Toadlet and her friend had casually told me that there was a dead cow in the burn when they came in for tea!

I hope it was a quick death for the poor animal. I think we would have heard it if it had been lowing in distress. Presumably a couple of the old sleepers gave way under its weight, or it lost its footing on the slippery surface. Fortunately other heifers didn't follow it but went back the way they'd come.


It would seem that the couple of remaining sleepers, which are strong enough for people to cross, are also allright for sheep.

The farmer brought a small digger when he came to collect the cow but it wasn't big enough to reach into the ravine so he had to go for a bigger one. This ended with my seeing at our front gate the bizarre scene of a cow hoisted by a rope being transferred from big digger to small digger before it was taken away.

On the other side of the bridge (in the photo on the left I'm looking back towards our back garden fence) the farmer had cut back some rhododendron (the muddy patch) and stacked it in such a way as to guide the sheep the way he wanted them to go. The space between our back and the bridge had been used as a holding area a couple of times and the sheep had chomped all the vegetation so my way to collect chanterelle mushrooms just before the bridge was well clear. It's chanterelle mushrooms in a creamy pasta sauce for tea tonight. Yumtastic.

Last September the lane between our back fence
and the forest looked liked this: a single file roe
deer and chanterelle hunter's path.

Making, cooking, looking

Yesterday I made
<<< this, with the help of instructions creatively translated from Chinese (well done, whoever! it's not as if I could do it t'other way!) and a YouTube video by MO3MINI...

...into this,

a necessity because what with the lawnmower Toad uses conking out and being now at the menders, and scything not being suitable for some places, I need a tool with more power. It has a blade as well for stuff the strimmer wire can't deal with. I haven't used it yet because the single shoulder strap isn't enough and we need 2-stroke oil. Toad offered to pick some up today.

While the tool assembly was going on
<<< this bowl of egg whites, having been made into meringue, was cooking in a slow oven.

And very nice they were too for afternoon tea.
It's always good to have an excuse to eat thick cream ;)

The yolks, by the way, had gone into a cabbage carbonara sauce the day before.

Meanwhile in the garden, apart from a lot of lush grass, late summer flowers are blossoming and, in the case of wild angelica, being taken advantage of by Sphlex maxillosus wasps. I think that' what they are anyway.







Irrepressible Rose is doing what it does best after being chewed down to the ground earlier in the year. I hope it will flower next year. I'm going to try and tie it on the inside of its trellis to see if that keeps the deer off it. Some chicken wire might also be deployed.

Oh, and I made a pie with my benchmark pastry :)

The Boggy Brae apron

A repeated theme of the Booth family gatherings that happen in the US is T-shirt tie-dyeing.

This year, Toadlet (fifth up from the bottom on the left in the photo) practised her artistic calligraphy skills on a tie-dyed apron for me as well. I love it.

best apron ever

She got all the details...



...including both forms of my name, a reference to my Twitter 'handle', the name of this blog, lots of details of the Boggy Brae garden, even an arrow for my archery interest and, at the bottom of the apron, my response to a doctor who was eulogising about low fat diets. He stopped.

Three weeks of summer

Toadlet and I headed south and stayed overnight with the Derbyshire branch of the family. We had time to do a bit of exploring of an old quarry where trees now grow.

Next day I took Toadlet to my sister's house in Norfolk so that she could go to a family reunion in upstate New York << with this lot. I returned to DerbyshireDaughter's house. Three days of driving left me tired so we mooched about making jam and other relaxng things for a couple of days.

using up any old bits of sugar

'Moo' made the labels

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Then we (DD and partner, 'Moo' and 'Piglet', plus me) went on a family day visit to Wentworth Castle near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. Here is 'Piglet' in front of a well-stacked wood pile.

Piglet and wood

It was turning into a hot day and his sunhat had been forgotten so I fashioned a hat for him out of my Seasalt snood – very piratical as well as practical.

Seasalt cap

Because we had also forgotten to bring sun screen, DerbyshireDaughter begged a splodge of it from another young mother for use on the fairheads and redheads of the family. Nothing like being a mum for making you bold in protecting your loved ones.

'Moo' in the children's play area

The gardens and the views from them were lovely.

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After this I went to the house where I grew up (from the day before my twelfth birthday) in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire. My mother and my youngest brother still live there, he as her carer as she has Degenerative Macular Disease and is registered blind, though she can see large things very blurred: enough to get around without walking into things, but details and small things elude her. Tom also went to the family reunion so I was taking his place for a couple of weeks.

As well as making mum's meals and doing stuff like shopping, I tidied out a few cluttered old drawers. My mum grew up during the WW2 so hoarding things that just might be useful is ingrained in her psyche (mine too, learned from her, but to a slightly lesser extent). Also, she can no longer see well enough to know clutter and tat from useful stuff.

 And so, among other things, I threw out a dozen or so plastic medicine spoons, the sort that come with every bottle of medicine. There was a fair bit of other cheap plastic cutlery too, some of it broken. I do hope Wyre Council recycle stuff like this.

It was quite fun sorting through the oldest drawers, those from my parents' first (and only) kitchen cupboard in their house in Horsforth, the part of Yorkshire where I and three of my siblings were born. Mum still has this small but practical kitchen cupboard in her pantry.

Mum's house is like a museum. The two miners' lamps are kept on a high shelf above the picture rail in the hall. They are there in memory of the paternal side of my family who were coal miners in South Yorkshire. My grandad was good with his hands and mended his own shoes. His cobbler's anvil is in mum's boiler room.

cobbler's anvil

Some of his other tools hang in the tool shed that used also to be the coal shed, and some are to be found in the garage.

old tools and bits & pieces

Another old thing, this one in the pantry on a high shelf, is an old tin of liquorice. It contains prepared liquorice roots as well as lumps of black stuff that I presume is part processed on its way to becoming liquorice Pontefract Cakes. For my dad, growing up as a young child in Featherstone, Pontefract was the great metropolis until his family moved to Leeds.

Wiki image

Which brings me in a roundabout way to mum's washing-machine. There was a faint but persistent smell in mum's kitchen. DerbyshireDaughter and I finally traced it to the washing-machine. We dosed it with vinegar and hot water a couple of times (I'm leaving instructions about this with Tom!) and then DD decided to clean the filter. Let's just say we were... amazed... and had no idea what could have caused the filter to get so black!

Later I checked the filter again and found a black round thing that reminded me of a Pontefract Cake. I think it must have been there for a while and it wasn't dissolving so I presume it wasn't a Pontefract Cake. The mystery remains.

There is an old apple tree in mum's garden, half of which is dead but the other half produces apples so the dead half is kept as a counterweight! The apples are very like Bramley cooking apples but sweeter so adding sugar to them in pies is not usually required. Windfalls are collected and left out for the milk deliverer's pigs.

windfall apples on the doorstep

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During DerbyshireDaughter's two day stay at mum's house while I was there, we went beachwards up to Fleetwood. Far less crowded there than the middle part of the Fylde coast, i.e. Blackpool, and especially on a very breezy day. We stopped near Fleetwood boating lake for model boats and small kayaks and enjoyed a windy walk on the empty beach.

'Piglet' was dead chuffed with his new sunglasses.

We found the boundary stone of the Preston and Wyre Railway. Before the railway up through Cumbria and into the west of Scotland was built, Fleetwood was the end of the line. The old hotel on the front at Fleetwood is called the North Euston Hotel.

After that the best way to get to Scotland on the west side of Great Britain was by boat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As well as trying to do helpful things at mum's, I managed a bit of wreckage when I slipped and fell out of the shower bringing the shower curtain rail down with me. But this was nothing compared to what happened when those at the clan gathering in Pulteney, NY assembled for a final group photo on the jetty (or dock, as they called it) at Keuka Lake.

it was all going swimmingly and then...

...even more swimmingly, you might say!

Apparently the dock had been a bit wobbly all week. No-one was hurt and those left standing found it hilarious. This family get-together won't be forgotten in a hurry! :)