Monday 20th May 2011
The plant nursery at Birsay is closing and has a sale on today and tomorrow. The lady has sold the house and is moving in with a friend until she finds another house for herself. Pam and Claire decided that we should shoot up there because there were bound to be loads of bargains.
The Birsay nursery must be one of the most exposed nurseries in the UK. It sits at the top of a hill looking down on the extreme northern tip of mainland Orkney. I don't think that there is anything except ocean between Birsay and Canada.
At least if you buy a plant from there then you know that it will survive anywhere.
I wasn't thinking properly when we went to the nursery and so I took the little car. Pam and Claire bought not only a few plants but also loads of plantpots and other assorted containers. Of course it was "muggins" that had to somehow get all their purchases fitted into a car that was not designed to carry loads of freight. Being a master of packing, I just managed to get everything and everybody in. We now have enough plantpots to last the remainder of our lives and then some.
I am buying some goslings from a neighbour a few fields away. He is in love with his geese and so i had to have an inspection to see if he thought that we were good enough to have any of his geese. I have already built a shelter for them to use if the weather is bad and that was approved. The field is fenced so I was confident that we would pass.
This turned out to be over-confidence. When Dennis came round, all was OK except that apparently geese like tender new shoots of grass so he thought it would be a good idea to mow tha field to encourage new growth for them. I promised to top the field and dennis went away happy.
I duly topped the field a couple of days later and I will probaly have to do it again as I could not cut to low without leaving a swath that would lie on the field.
The broody hen has managed to hatch three Orpingtonchicks from the five eggs that I had put under her. I had to take the chicks off her and put them under a heat light. If I had left the chicks with her then they would have been taken by one of the multitude of avian predators that are constantly on the look-out for unprotected hatchlings, especially at this time of year.
It sometimes surprises me that any of the seabirds around here manage to raise any young. I suppose they manage by sheer weight of numbers, there being to many chicks for the predators to possibly eat them all.
I will have to build a run with a roof on it to keep chicks in but not at the moment as it is to windy.
I collected the sit-on mower from the lad in Finstown. He charged a total of £50 and that included new parts, so he is a lot cheaper than anywhere else. I have added him to my "Must not forget" list.
Another icelandic volcano has threatened to cause chaos to air travel as happened last year. Kirkwall and some of the other northern airports were shut but only for one day. I noticed on the news that the boss of Ryan Air was saying that there was no volcanic ash over Scotland. This made me wonder why my cars, along with all the other cars in Orkney were covered in a good thickness of ash on Tuesday morning. Maybe it was the ash fairy.
Apparently Ryan Air had sent an aircraft up to take air samples and they claimed that they had found no ash at all. Maybe they were right then.
Unfortunately for Ryan Air, their sampling flight had been tracked on radar and it did not go anywhere near where the ash cloud was supposed to be so maybe it was not the "ash fairy".
Molly's dog training on tuesday evening went well and everybody was very impressed at how much she had improved. Unfortunately this improvement was from a very low base a couple of weeks ago
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