All is well ...

... in spite of the wet weather, in case you were wondering.  My much delayed posting is due to the fact that I got myself tangled up in too many little jobs and was running late on all of them apart from the unseasonal gingerbread house [birthday cake] I made for the family of a friend.  That turned out well and was ready one day early [I was pleased with the idea of the little mouse frightening the Heffalump away, photo bottom right]:

Then it was time to pack up some home grown [by John] veggies and send them to Maria for her birthday, she LOVES her curly kale and sprouts!  That parcel was sent late as my "little sister" was being treated to a few days' pampering in a posh hotel in Portsmouth, where she got a rude awakening on her birthday morning at 2 am!  All hotel guests [including the Torquay football team] were being evacuated and relocated to another hotel because of a "water problem", yes, the south-west of the country has been suffering a lot worse than our midlands.  Maria's birthday plans had to be changed, but I think she had a good time anyway...  The second parcel for Germany is still work in progress, I even missed the post with the card yesterday, I'm getting worse in my old age!

Something else that happened at the beginning of February apart from Maria's birthday was our first duck egg!  I found it in the all-girl hut on Monday while cleaning, so it was either laid on the 1st or 2nd.  There've been three more since then and this morning there were two in the duck shed as well, we have our first half dozen of 2014 - which I promised to friend Graham.

It must be the unusually mild weather - to think we only had the last egg of 2013 on 16th December.  A good job I started feeding the girls waterfowl layers' pellets for good shell formation on 1st February, we don't want any problems with soft egg shells!

















The mild weather must be responsible for the white camellias making such a lovely show in the front garden, although the almost constant rain soon turns the white blossoms brown.  It is raining as I'm writing this, but it's nothing like as bad as it was on this day late January:



Towards the end of January I also managed to get three kilos of Seville oranges [excellent delivery by Abel&Cole as Tesco's did not have any the last three times John went looking] and I made three lots of marmalade, 20 glasses in all - I'm not going to run out of my favourite marmalade again like I did last year! Big Thank You to friend Peaneh again for the tip of turning the jars with the hot marmalade upside down, thereby creating a vacuum:

My son Carl did a lovely thing with a very old, torn, small photo of his and Annie's dad which I used to carry about with me in my purse, and which I found again during a sorting out session and posted on Facebook. Carl worked on the original and came up with this [It was taken in Malta 1966, when Derek was on duty with the Royal Leicestershire Regiment at Ghaijn Tuffieha Bay:




Remember this magpie stealing shell noodles out of the ducks' breakfast bowl?  I was wondering at the time if it could do the same thieving if there were spaghetti in the bowl, well, I never saw that or any other magpie at those bowls again, they're too busy trying to hover and get at the bird food hanging from the big birch.  But just a couple of days ago I saw a big crow or jackdaw flying off from the bowl by the greenhouse with a great bundle of spaghetti in its beak - this was early in the morning before our ducks had come back to raid it.  So I wasn't having that and no longer put that bowl by the greenhouse, the jackdaws and crows don't usually come as close to the house as the magpie did.
The pheasants, as ever, know when it's feeding time.  There were 15 this morning and 9 jackdaws until I opened the window to take a snap of them:














I don't have any new photos of the ducks, but as this is mainly a duck diary I'll search out some from a rain-free day in January, Friday 17th.  On 'line-ups like these two it's a good opportunity to introduce ducks and drakes and compare colours and sizes:


From left to right: Dash, Winnie, Vera, Ben, Caramel, black Jay behind her, Beyoncé, Mocca behind Tuts and the white Daisy.

Left to right again: Dash, Tuts, Vera behind Purdy in front, Caramel, Winnie, Captain, GertieII, Anke, Beyoncé, Daisy, Jay-Z, Ben and Billie-Jean.



Ben[in front] and Billie-Jean, the one who hatched our 2012 brood.  Just lately she hasn't quite made up her mind where she wants to sleep, whether in Dotty's hut with GertieII and Dash and Vera - and sometimes Winnie - or in the duck shed with the three boys.














               a nice picture of Mocca right in front

Mocca and Daisy don't often get featured in photos.  Mocca [with the bumble foot] is very shy, and along with the other two we've taken to the vet's, Honey and Dotty, does her utmost to keep out of our reach - they certainly don't like being handled and appear to have long memories of vet visits ....   Daisy, since Candida died our only white duck, seems quite a strong character; I often see her leading the whole gang coming up to feed.




Dash [behind] is the cleverest of our 2012 hatch I think.  She's always the first on the scene when any gardening is going on and is so brave she comes perilously close to garden forks.  Every morning she's first out of the hut and, rather than delving into the bigger breakfast bowl with the other 4 girls she speeds to behind the apple tree where a smaller bowl stands and has it all to herself.
Honey still has great trouble walking and rests a lot, often all by herself in a little hidey hole.  The morning flight to the big pond seems to exhaust her, but she always turns up out of hiding as soon as the grains are put out and feeds eagerly.

Captain, our last survivor from the first hatch of 2005, is really 'top dog' of the whole bunch. Age, experience and size - he is the biggest - appear to play a role.  He and Anke [on his left in this photo] are still on their own in the bottom hut, nobody has joined them, although several of the ducks have "courted" him [maybe Anke wants to keep him to herself?].  And on the odd occasion when they've run up here with the rest of them of an evening and have got shut in one or the other of the huts, they both hightail it down to their "home" immediately the next morning!