Don't chuck stuff on the primrose plants

I'm still busy hacking the rhododendron hedge along the drive down to a manageable height. You can see some of what's left of the shrubs I've already cut near the bottom of the photo below. They will soon be green again. Rhododendron ponticum doesn't need any encouragement! I enjoyed the sunshine today while I worked.

I suddenly noticed that I was throwing logs onto some springily sprouting primrose plants. Oops! So to prevent further such depredations I stuck some sticks around the primrose area and made a bit of string with some ivy pulled out of the monster hedge to remind me to walk (and chuck) clear of the patch.

My wood pile under the oil pipe is growing. That's the neat pile, believe it or not. There are several scraggy piles dotted about where I've left branches to drop their leaves themselves. Less than two metres to go now of the monster hedge.

The sunshine was nice while it lasted but you have to make the most of the short winter sun as it slides behind the hill in early afternoon. I think we are back to cloudy tomorrow.

Christmas tree one-upmanship and preparing sprouts early

My Christmas tree is 8cm tall. Beat that! 😜 It is a cypress tree I found growing some while ago where it shouldn't so I hoiked it up and planted it in a pot. Today it occurred to me to make it into a Christmas tree. I like that the left-most holly berry seems to have a smiley face.

The sprout-ready wreath. Not that we'll be necessarily eating sprouts on Christmas Day though we do like them, especially with melted cheese and bacon. Today I learned that melted, well... softened, baked... Feta, an unfavourite cheese of mine, really does work with leeks and Puy lentils baked in crème fraîche and sprinkled with crumbled Feta and breadcrumbs*. This is also good with bacon.

* Recipe idea from Rukmini Iyer

Catching the winter light

Went for a garden wander this morning after yesterday's Storm Dierdre. The low angled morning sunshine picked out quite a few bright things.

Gorse, primrose (that was a surprise!), winter leaf of meadowsweet, and  a yellow leaf in the snow

Cypress leaf in a log on the bonfire site, winter fern (lemon-scented, I think),

dock 'berries', rushes in the field, and one leaf of a baby beech tree.


Lichen & moss 'forest' on a stone, lichen off a tree, fresh green fern frond, and what

looks like an insect gall on a fallen goat willow leaf. Once I'd spotted one I saw lots.

Some pics from this day in previous years

Looking back at our wee loch from up and along the hill a bit


Leaves and seeds in back garden




Hills to the north: Beinn Ime, The Cobbler, Beinn Narnain


'Round hill of the deer' (can't remember the Gaelic!) across the loch through winter larches

Visiting family

During my recent visit to DerbyshireDaughter and family we enjoyed a seasonal lantern parade round a few streets in Hadfield. This is the bee lantern made by DD and the boys, M & H. When I told Toad about the lantern he expressed scepticism about the appropriateness of a bee lantern in December. I said: "ivy bee". He didn't know about ivy bees, it seems (neither did I until recently). It might not be a good ivy bee portrait but with some artistic licence and the requirements of such lanterns, it was just fine! The parade was fun and there were lots of impressive lanterns.

DD and family are very fond of board games and have some excellent ones old and new. This board is one of the new ones, Photosynthesis.

While in Derbyshire I started a temari. I haven't made one for a while so was relearning a few of the nifty ideas I'd acquired when I made them more often, such as how great circles work in thread. This design, called Phoenix by Diana Vandervoort in her book, Temari Traditions: more techniques for Japanese thread balls, does not work too well on the size of ball I was using. Well, I say 'doesn't work' but the whole ball will work when I've finished my adaptations.

Temari 2018

I thoroughly enjoyed the boys' school rendering of the Nativity play. M's part was that of a cool dude angel with tinsil-edged wings and M was a happy shepherd.

My train journey to the house where I grew up, where my mum and my youngest brother (her carer now she is old and frail) still live, was straightforward. As always the mosses and liverworts on the back garden paths were amazing. The picture shows a small part near the back door.

When I left to come back to Scotland the rising sun was glorious.

sunrise in N Lancs 13 December 2018

Bryophytes and sunlight to punctuate a two day stay during which a highlight was a visit from my eldest brother and his wife. We are a spread out family so it's good to meet up when we can. When middle brother saw the photo below he sent some of recent chill in upstate New York where he lives. See below.

mum, eldest bro, me, youngest bro, sister-in-law

Finally, on my train journey back up north (even norther, I should say) I found myself within uncomfortable hearing distance of an unconscious sniffer 😣. One learns from experience: I now travel with earplugs! In they went. They weren't needed for long as he got off at the first stop. Phew.

Pink porridge

The grandsons and their mum have been experimenting with coloured sugar for reindeer food to sell at their recent school fair. Edible glitter was rejected as not being good for reindeer or other wildlife and so, in the end, was coloured sugar. So I get to have pink porridge at their house.

Outrage about sugar on porridge will be ignored 😜

Hedge hacking continues

I didn't quite fill the bucket with dead rhododendron sticks during this morning's hedge hacking stint. Only two or three metres still to go to get the main stretch down to knee height so that I can trim it with the hedge cutter more easily. Shoulder height is too much of a strain with the weight of the hedge cutter.

Filling the old, leaky mop bucket with small sticks good for kindling and adding bigger branches and fresh cut pieces to the woodpile for future firewood is how it goes. I'm also making piles that are still in leaf do deal with later. So far I've filled a whole coal bag (they seem to drop off the local coal lorries regularly! If I find them I pick them up and bring them home) and started another.

That woodpile pic was taken about a week ago. It's more extensive now.

I also collected, as you see, that tube thingy that Toad had apparently 'planted' (chucked off the roof that he was repairing) below the den 😉. It could be a good plant marker for one of next year's orchids.








Before being driven inside again by rain I topped up my wildflower count for the week. There's a challenge on Twitter to find #thewinter10 for #wildflowerhour (8–9pm Sundays). I've found well over ten during the last three weeks. It will be interesting to see how the count progresses through the winter. Here's a compilation of a few phone pics from this week and my list of seventeen.

Walking home

Yesterday was cold but sunny, perfect for walking, so I did, from the head of the loch to home. It took me two and a half hours, not because it's a long way but because I was clambering up and down the lochside depending on the walkability of the beach. In some places there is very little beach and the banks up to the road are steep and rocky. In some places, such massive trees have fallen down into the loch that it's difficult to get past them. There was one enormous ash tree, its trunk covered in thick old ivy stems, which I couldn't go under or round so over it had to be.

Eight months ago I did the same walk though more on the road that time. One of my finds was the old boat Caol Ila. Yesterday I saw it from the other side. It's definitely a dead boat.

Anchor and rudder below

At one point I needed to climb back up to the road. Luckily there was a rope tied to the trees to help haul myself up. I'd have got rather muddy otherwise!

Took some pics of wild flowers still in flower for #thewinter10 on #wildflowerhour run by some botanists on Twitter...
.

 ...and enjoyed a leafy bit of beach as I neared home.


By this time I had much aching of arthritic knees and feet to contend with. Happily painkillers, a large piece of carrot cake, and a nap dealt with the worst of that. The weather is back to cloudy and showery today.

Night baking

I woke in the small hours and couldn't get back to sleep so made a cup of tea and read for a bit. This usually sends me back to the Land of Nod in due course. This morning it didn't so I thought "More tea, and maybe a biscuit" then, realising there were no biscuits worthy of the name for my current requirements–digestives just don't cut it sometimes!–I decided to get up and make some.

Gansey jumper on over the PJs, beanie on head, socks, slippers, and off I went downstairs at 0330. For years I've followed a very good ginger biscuit recipe, by a Mrs Ruth Boyer, which is to be found on page 138 (you can tell that page of my copy has been opened a gazillion times) of Yorkshire TV's Farmhouse Kitchen recipe book published in 1978. This time I decided to modify it by swapping the ginger for ground goriander seed and cinnamon and by adding dried cranberries and white chocolate chips. My favourite supermarket-baked cookies are white choc chip and cranberry ones but shop cookies are never as good as home made ones, even when baked on site, it's just that I've never managed to replicate the chewiness. Tonight was the night to succeed!

So, with the oven heating up, by 0400 the beanie was pulled off and measuring/mixing was under way. Although the recipe says the biscuits take 20 minutes to bake, in our fan oven they only took 10.  The recipe says it makes 40 biscuits. I made 38. I have scoffed two and drunk another cup of tea. If it were not still dark I'd be outside hedge hacking. By the way, the Boggy Brae midges are still biting! Fortunately there are not many and they seem to be an effete generation so their bites are not causing much itching.

Another by the way, particularly for relations should they be reading this, that red spot beyond the table is a felt leaf patch on a heavy quilt made out of old trousers of mine, with old brushed cotton shirt fabric for backing and a cotton bedspread for wadding. The chair belonged to my maternal grandma. Yesterday I was at the funeral of the grandma of one of Toadlet's school friends so grandma thoughts are rising.

On orange

There was a deep orange stripe in the sky to the east as I walked down the hill at 7 o'clock this morning. Sitting on the bus a little later I noticed the perfectly and naturally arranged orange hair of a young man in front of me around his perfectly placed crown. I have a double crown so my hair is confused!

Later, while hedge hacking, I enjoyed the orange foliage of a large and large-leaved cotoneaster. It is springing up quite a lot here in the last few years, presumably spread by birds who eat the berries. Although I think the shrubs are invasive non-natives, they are also rather handsome at this time of year. The first one is on the lane below the cottage next door and the second is in next-door's garden. There is also one on the field side of our south fence. They cheer up dull days.

The twenty-plumed moth, or one of its relations, is still around. If it is the same one, which apparently it could be, it has now been in the house for over a month. I'm a little bit puzzled by the description in that link. It says the wings are each made up of six 'feathers', but if you actually count the quills there are ten for each wing which, given its name, Twenty-plumed moth, is what you'd expect. Hexadactyla refers to its six insect legs. I guess the fact that the scientific binomial and the English name do not actually 'match' has caused some confusion. Here it is on an orange bit of wall.

Apparently honeysuckle is this moth's foodplant. The BoggyBrae has masses of honeysuckle growing around and up various trees and over stumps. Now I need to find out what the caterpillars look like.