our house on a wet Sunday...

Today:

-Fighting the quails for elderberries - they love them & it's very funny watching them eat them & it must be good for them as they start to moult, but we want them to make Elderberry Rob...
-Cutting out the last two crows on a block of lino that now has forty eight crows, finished, yipee.
-Teaching a beginners lino course, indoors, out of the rain with hot tea and coconut slices.
-Drilling holes in walls to put up all the things that needed holes drilling.
-Playing card games about geography, yawn.
-Not seeing the ISS because it is cloudy AGAIN, will we see it at all this month? We really want to.

Must be Autumn.

as happy as a quail...

Quails like the small things in life (woodlice, worms, seeds etc) and are often to be heard chiruping away to themselves with delight when presented with a new bowl of sand to bathe in or a bowl of leftover rice from last nights tea.

Nothing gets them more worked up than a bunch of burstingly ripe elderberries though.

I'm sure they can feel the Autumn goodness giving them a little boost to keep their lovely eggs coming for a bit longer before they start to moult and settle down for a winter snuggled on top of their hot water bottles.

Watch out to the right though Speckeldy because Eagle has just spotted what you have got...

will it be pink?

Today is beautiful and sunny ( I think we are allowed to be pleased because it did rain a bit yesterday...) and the perfect day for harvesting elderflowers.

We are really lucky because we only have to walk as far as the back garden to harvest ours and it is a beautiful black elder, so the flowers are pink - and there are hundreds this year, maybe thousands...the air is filled with the smell and buzzing creatures are coming from all around.

The first year we lived here I was uncertain as to whether the black elder was edible, but having made several batches of Elderberry Tonic for the winters and berry crumbles with a few elderberries thrown in I can safely say that we have all survived and the quails have thrived on elderberries each Autumn, so it must be.

This year is the first Elderflower Cordial year for this bush and I am really, really hoping that it will be bright, bright pink, like the flowers...24 hours of steeping has just begun, the kitchen smells fantastic...we will find out tomorrow!