Haven't been posting much recently - too busy. Way way way too busy. But on the upside we've got 400 or so trees in and they are mostly surviving even given this stinking hot, horrible, stinking, horrible, dreadful heatwave in BLOODY NOVEMBER that we're stuck in the middle of. We think about a less than 5% death rate in the trees which is astounding. Slightly higher graft failure ratio - but again, nothing to be stressed about, particularly as some of the grafting material was pretty thin / whippy.

Lots of other things - more on that later. We've had a bit of luck in the duck department - Angelina sat on 17 eggs in the end and 11 hatched. Alas one duckling died in a trampling incident - Jim's parenting style appears to come from the herding / rather than caring department. One of the other ducklings unfortunately drowned when it got stuck under a small bridge that we'd supplied to get them in and out of the low water dish. So 9 at this stage.

Lousy photo as usual - Angelina's completely feral and it's tricky to line up a photo without getting a lot of her gaping mouth in the middle of it - if you want to get close enough to get a decent view.

Hopefully they will be out and about soon - they're now over a week old and starting to shape up like little ducks - rather than balls of fluff.

And we'll keep trying for a photo but I'm not promising anything.