Steady work for early January

January I have to admit is not my favourite month, the grounds usually to wet to work and so it seems jobs start piling up, having said that this weekend has been reasonably dry with just the odd shower, so I did get the chance to rake up the final drop of leaves of the front lawn it is a bit shaded at the best of times having three Oak trees one Sycamore and a Beech tree growing in it so we do have a lot of leaves to deal with and it certainly benefits from a good raking which i do quite roughly so as to drag out some of the dead thatch and moss. Oak and Sycamore leaves seem to rake up quite easily but the Beech is a different cup of tea altogether, small leaves and a mass off beech nuts that if you dont remove seem to poison the grass .
I had a look at the dahlias that i put in store and was a bit disappointed with the way that some had stored about 1 in 4/5 had started to rot, i was a bit worried when i put them away in November that the condition of them was not ideal with such a wet backend and no frost to kill the tops some seemed a bit soft and immature and even though i did dry them in the greenhouse for a week before packing them away, as a precaution I packed each one individually so as not to encourage fungus spread so the results may have been worse had i not . Any way the sound ones got another dusting of anti fungal and a 24 hour airing before repacking so hopefully things will be better from now on . I got a chance to prepare a base for sighting some barrels to grow long carrots this year, this will be my first attempt at growing them this way and we will just have to see how we go on (look back in august September to see how it went), any carrots i have grown before have just been in the veg plot and i have never had a great lot of luck with them probably because my ground is a bit stony and heavy. On the work front well we treated all breeding sheep which had the first snow off winter to deal with (see picture) for Fluke parasites which took a couple of days, and then did a bit of sale preparation on the last 6 store cattle that we will be selling on Thursday 13th I am reasonably confident of a decent trade but they won't be a flyer as they are the last to go of the 2006 calf crop.

Football result United 3 Port Vale 2 Now 2'nd in League