on John's birthday

It is Saturday morning now, so for the photos I have to go back to Wednesday evening when Pat and Graham had finished another whole day's gardening effort - they didn't leave for home until 20 to 8!

Pat cleared 5 sections of this neighbour's fence single-handedly, a brilliant effort, and also brought us all tea twice in the day and kept the fire going where we burned rotten fence posts, brambles, nettles, trees sprouting in the wrong place .....

We had our cups of tea sitting on those 3 chairs Graham

stacked up again, the tyre was one more of two I found in the undergrowth -

adding to the 5 I'd already got out before along with stacks of old windows, tins, rope ...

The next day, Thursday, I'd been gardening with the ducks, went in for a quick lunch, and coming out again early afternoon carried on planting the dahlias and fuchsias Graham had grown for me. I heard persistent quacking from the big pond and went to investigate, I thought they'd been down there a bit long anyway. Caramel was doing the persistent quacking, but I couldn't see anything untoward until .... I spotted this load of feathers at the side of the pond, a cock pheasant's:

At first I thought it unlikely that a fox would have got a pheasant, but what bird is big and powerful enough to tackle one from the air? The fox must have lain in wait in the area thick with cow parsley and nettles behind and at the side of the pond and pounced when the pheasant was unaware, and to judge by how frightened the seven ducks in the water were they must have witnessed the whole thing.

They were reluctant to leave the "safety" of the water, but I eventually coaxed them out and guided them back to the enclosure, then shut the gate.

I went back to weeding and planting near the garage, when my eye caught a movement further down the garden - a fox was coming up from the direction of the pond! My yelling would have woken the neighbourhood, I ran down there and chased it away.

Yesterday morning was very wet and I didn't get out into the garden until after 11 when I opened the gate for the ducks. They were extremely reluctant to go down to the pond, their favourite place, and kept looking in that direction, especially the two boys.

Eventually they plucked up courage and went to the pond. I spent about an hour there with them tearing out nettles and cow parsley to rob any predator of some cover. Then I finished planting up what used to be John's cold frame:

The "formal" bit of garden is horribly overgrown, yesterday I made a start with clearing unwanted growth. There is a vast amount of seedling sprouting in the round patch where I threw the mixture of flower seeds, but I'm afraid they're all weeds and tufts of grass and the odd potato ..............