Heaven forbid.

 It’s warm and nine degrees is enough to get out in the garden, it’s enough to walk and breath in the air and it is most definitely enough to shovel gravel and get so hot you need to take off your top layer of jumpers. Mike bought me this thermometer for Christmas and I really enjoy clocking our climate as I pass by the cart at the front of the house. The sky has been clear and blue today, full of promise of warm summer days lasting way into the evening and I for one can’t wait. It is however, still only March and we must stop willing the winter over  because it actually still has a purpose and one of them is to give us the time to get our bare rooted fruit  trees transplanted before they start to wake up. Yesterday we went to the local pepiniere open day and took up their offer of six fruit trees for thirty five euros. The man selling was full of good advice and promised that these trees would bear good strong fruit and I believe him, why wouldn’t I ?  Mike and I discussed the pros and cons of yet another expenditure but agreed it was a small price to pay to finish off the orchard so, as they say, we went for it. The pepiniere then got his secateurs out and started to hack the trees to within an inch of their lives. I mentioned that the English are very sensitive about pruning too hard and he just said we should not be afraid and kept hacking. So there we have it in nine degrees of winter warmth we planted the last six trees in the orchard bringing the audit to nine apple, four pear, three plum and two walnut and in five years time we hope to be a couple of happy fruit pickers and that really is something to look forward to.

Whilst digging Mike clunked his spade against something metal in the hole and dug out this horse shoe. What a fabulous find because we can only imagine that it would have fallen off the horse in the middle of a ploughing pass. We have found a few shoe dumps around the barn area and presume the farrier just buried them to clear the decks  but one on it’s own in the middle of the field, now my orchard, does conjure up the possibilities of the horse de-shoeing himself and the farmer going home in a rage and having to call in the farrier to get his beast back to work. Life must have been as stressful then as it can be now only we get fired up about the Butagaz man and banks that don’t trust each other. So there you have it, a little bit of history at the turn of a spade. Mike did mention that if we find another shoe we stop digging, and it took me a couple of moments to compute his ponderings,  six foot down and a posy of flowers left by a tearful  farmer walking back to his homestead was the image that came to mind, heaven forbid.