Good Weekend

Gosh, its been such a long time since I last blogged. Sorry about that folks.

Having a good weekend, yesterday was spend mostly in the garden. Got my plan sorted out for the veg plots for the summer. I'll have to blog about that later. Anyway yesterday was spend most clearing areas of the garden. Gave the fir tree a bit of a chop to let more light into the bed below it and visited homebase for spinach seed and another pair of secetours. I've no idea where my original pair have got to.

Today been up to Blashford Lakes to do some bird watching. Highlight must have been the Iceland Gull. First one ever for Blashford apparently. Also saw the Black Necked Grebes together with my favourite grebe, the Little Grebe.

Lovely Tits

Was sat in the conservatry today having been off work sick, yes I'm feeling a lot better but think Sue might be going down with it. Anyway, Robin normally has the garden largely to himself, plus the odd Collard Dove, pidgeon and blackbird. However today we had a flock of various tits decend on the garden. Robin was going mad trying to chase them off his patch. He even had a go at the collard doves who were taken by surpise.

The tits contained at least 3 long tailed tits, 2 coal tit and some great and blue tits. This was the first time long tailed and coal tits have been seen in our garden. Lovely.

Going to do somecatch up blogs at somepoint, as I haven't bloged for ages. I haven't told you all about my holiday in Austria. It was great. Apologies to all for not getting a postcard. I did buy them and buy stamps but didn't get around to writing them out etc.

Do you know what it is?

This picture has been bugging me for a couple of weeks. Seen in my garden on one of our new fence post. Let me get very close to it to take the picture. Who'll like to guess what it is. I must admit I needed the help of another birder to tell me what it is.

Garden bird of the year

In my last blog I mentioned about seeing what I thought would be Bird of the year. Well today I saw what must be what be Garden Bird of the Year. Sue say it first and announced that we had a Heron in te garden. I thought she was playing a game, like on QI when they say that there is an elephant in the room. To be honest I did see one flying over a couple of weeks ago. As it didn't stop I couldn't count it in our garden list, but it did today. Nice one.

Lazy Day

Pottering around day today. Sat planting lots off seed in seed trays etc. What will hopefully be some nice flowers. I want to end up with a garden that is split into two. One the veg plot with as much veg as I can grow and the rest I want a sea of colour with flowers, shrubs and bushes.

Manchester and spuds

Sue had warned me that I really shouldn’t blog too much about Dopey Doris, as it would make it look like I was obsessed with her. So all I say is that I was served by her on Thursday but finally managed to avoid her on Friday, but was served by someone equally as Dopey.

Had a good day Saturday. Went to up Manchester on the train. Did a quick bit of spotting at Manchester Piccadilly train station before heading out to the airport. There was another guy there who warned me that they were being a bit tight on security and he had to sign in as a visitor. Even had a visitors ID badge. Thanking him, I took a few train photos before heading off to the airport.

There used to be a couple of small portacabins on top of Terminal 1 car park at Manchester airport. One was a spotters shop selling anything from photos, books to radios and telescopes. The other was a snack bar. Looking forward to both I found to my horror that they had both gone. There are re-doing the surface of the car park. I do hope that the portacabins will return. Good afternoons spotting before return to the city centre to photograph more trains, the trams and the odd Buses. Now do I put the tram pictures in my train gallery (as they do run on rails) or in the bus section (as they do really operate more like buses). However I do collect tram numbers as they are listed in my train spotting books, so they are trains. But who would be more interested in seeing pictures of them, the train people or the bus people? Oh the decisions.

Today was a day in the garden after the coffee trip that Sue mentions in her blog. I’ve planted the spuds. Taken up more room that I had hoped, In my grand plan I was going to go for first early potatoes, and so try to get in some more veg in the plot they were in after they had been harvested. However, Sue wanted baking spuds, so I’ve gone for main crop. Meaning no extra veg, and now they have taken up half of another plot. Some serious re-thinking here I guess.

Garden and SBS-1

Busy day working in the garden. Cutting down trees, pruning and sowing the broad bean seeds into pots. Got a lot done today. Still spring will soon be here and then it will by just one job after the other in the garden.

Spent more time on the www.openatc.com site again today. There is a problem with it in that it relies on users connecting up their system to provide the data. There was nothing on this area until about 4pm. It was good after that, just a bit cold sitting in the garden. Really wants me to get a SBS-1 box and be able to see the aircraft I real time and when I want to.

Watched Hayley Mills in Wild at Heart tonight for the first time. She was good but that show is really bad. Surely she can get better work than that. I guess that filming in Africa is a real draw.